I certainly am not perfect to the degree that I make a single commit or a relatively small number of “structured commits” to any branch I’m working on. Neither is anybody else (regardless of whether they think they are). Anyone who tailors their commit structure around a poorly designed tool interface is just wasting their own time, and therefore the company’s, in my opinion.

Well, I do, more or less. Whether it's a waste of time or not is dependent on how efficient you can do it, in my workflow it's efficient, and to which degree you can avoid waste as a consequence of a "messier" approach. For me, it evens out.