I don't think it's an antipattern if you're working by yourself. As you said, it's a safety net that helps your confidence in case something does go wrong. The only thing I'd recommend changing might be to make your commit messages a tiny bit more detailed, even for the interim commits - that way you know what's going on at each commit if you do have to eventually do a `git bisect` to hunt down a regression.

Going a step further and rebasing interactively to tidy up your logs would also accomplish the same goal, but if it's just for your own eyes, it's probably not worth the time.