I like for non-trivial stuff to have a branch with a series of logical commits, cleanly rebased atop main, then use -no-ff to force a merge commit anyway. That way you can the whole branch appears as a single commit/diff atop main in primary history but you can dig in to the original components of it if/when that's useful.

The primary obstacle to doing this for me is, if I'm honest, not having automated it sufficiently that I can't forget to do that.