Yes, and a culture problem, too. I guess I've been blessed that I've mostly only worked for "grown up" companies, but I've never encountered a workplace where people didn't write useful commit messages. At least one line description of the work done, but often multiple lines of valuable context. Only the junior devs had to be told to do it, but once they got into the habit, everyone understood why we do it and it was no big deal.

If I joined a company where people committed their code with "stuff" or "made some changes" or "asdfhlfo;ejfo;ae," that would be a red flag that I might have joined the wrong company, and I'd start to wonder what else the developers here do carelessly.

I once tutored an intern. Who thought he was The Best Programmer On Earth (didn't we all at that age?). He refused to use revision control, it slowed him down.

So we told him to commit at least once every day, with a relevant commit message, or else fail his internship.

He worked 21 more days. There were 21 commits: "17:00, time to go home".

I think it's a stretch to measure leadership quality on something so minor, a lot of teams find them pretty useless no matter how good they are.

I particularly love when the “CTO” is also the main offender.