alt Hacker News> A well laid out history of logical changes makes reviewing complicated change sets easier.
I've been on a maintenance team for years and it's also been a massive help here, in our svn repos where squashing isn't possible. Those intermediate commits with good messages are the only context you get years down the line when the original developers are gone or don't remember reasons for something, and have been a massive help so many times.
I'm fine with manual squashing to clean up those WIP commits, but a blind squash-merge should never be done. It throws away too much for no good reason.
For one quick example, code linting/formatting should always be a separate commit. A couple times I've seen those introduce bugs, and since it wasn't squashed it was trivial to see what should have happened.
I agree, in a job where you have no documentation and no CI, and are working on something almost as old or older than you with ancient abandoned tools like svn that stopped being relevant 20 years ago, and in a fundamentally dysfunctional company/organization that hasn't bothered to move off of dead/dying tools in the last 20 years, then you just desperately grab at anything you can possibly find to try to avoid breaking things. But there are far better solutions to all of the problems you are mentioning than trying to make people create little mini feature commits on their way to a feature.