Perhaps we could 'have it all' if git introduced a way of bundling commits, a bit like code-folding in an IDE. The bundles could be expanded when you need fine-grain detail of development history, but by default would be unexpanded and would behave like a single big commit, avoiding the issue of always seeing overwhelming detail.

git has that, it's called a merge commit. You can use `git log --first-parent` to see them unexpanded and then find what you want to expand.

A lot of higher level tools don't expose this functionality but it's not like it's not there.

Is there any high level tool that does expose that functionality?

Maybe... sure that's fewer commits to cherry pick. But when some reconciliation is needed to make a patch apply to different version branches, it's sure a whole lot easier to manage if the commits are small.

When rebasing my branches, most PRs will still be a single commit, some will be two or three. That's not that much worse than squashing, and far more informative.