The analogy doesn't hold up.

Commits have a more fixed size.

Formal logic cannot be reduced in character count too far, at least without making it unintelligible (fear the day Alex the intern wheels out Unicode emoji variables).

Spreading the commits out has a purpose.

Academic papers could be vastly compressed to reduce cognitive load.

Brevity and intelligibility however is not a KPI. Self aggrandisement is.

The issue is that novel paper ideas will be split across multiple years (and even multiple conferences), making it much harder to actually see the whole picture for a reader. Each little piece of the paper will often also be bloated with unnecessary extra detail in order to reach the threshold for "minimum publishable paper".

Splitting up a groundbreaking idea into so many papers that the idea is lost is 1) going beyond a “minimal publishable unit” and 2) not in the authors’ interest, since getting credit for a groundbreaking idea in a correspondingly prestigious outlet is much better than getting credit for 2 or 3 bad ideas. I’m sure there’s a level of novelty where 2 irrelevant papers is better for the author than 1 single paper, but I don’t think we should design academic publishing around slightly-better-than-mediocre contributions.

Using the same code analogy as the parent, this is like code with unnecessary extra commenting. Seems okay to me.