That's sort of what I was talking about, but I was getting down-voted for not explaining myself. It seems redundant to keep a changelog with its own state when writing good, user-readable version-change commit messages is something you already do. Using git-rebase could help you work in a version-change specific commit meant for users.

To clarify, not all of your commits need to be user-readable, since the majority of them are meant for developers -- just the sparse ones that capture the version change need to be user-readable.

Then you'd have a full commit history for the nitty gritty details and a subset of your commits would be used to generate a pretty changelog.md for everyone who wants the TLDR.