It's not really just convention. Git commit messages map directly to emails for workflows that don't use web UIs like GitHub, with the first line being the subject and the rest being the email body. That's how you mail a commit to someone else for them to review it or incorporate it into their local repo.
If you don't format your commit messages properly then they'll just be a sloppy mess in any email-based workflow (like what Linux uses).
And the first line is the only line that's displayed in contexts like `git log`, so it truly is the commit summary even if you aren't emailing commits.
Re:GitHub CLI is now in beta
by solarkraft on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @07:27PM
(#22314281)
That's still just a convention :-) But you'll find that most of the things humans do are. Everything is a social construct.
If you're going to define your words in such a way that what you're saying is meaningless, why bother even saying anything at all?
> exactly the same mechanism as git uses for "git commit"
That's not how git commit works. git commit opens $EDITOR and makes a list of lines (sans commented-out lines) from that. The first line being a title is only convention, whereas in a github PR it's a formal element of the system.