To be clear, what I'm advocating for is that feature branches get rebased regularly by the developer until PR-time and a clean merge into the mainline. I usually recommend squashing to one commit but do not insist.

I can definitely see how those intermediate commits can provide more information, but there's a tradeoff. More often than not, they do not provide me much value, and instead give me bloat, so I prefer to keep things simple.

Telling developers not to do something is like telling a kid not to push that red button. The average developer chooses what's easiest _right now_ and thinks it's someone else's job to fix the mess at PR time. And they're afraid, because that one time five years ago they ran a rebase without knowing what it does, and lost some code without knowing it's actually right there in the reflog, and since then they are deathly afraid of Git. I know how to use log and diff and all the others quite well, but most don't. So I'm trying to make things easier on everyone in the long term, not the short term.