That doesn't have a commit history going back to what the parent said about the first 200 commits though. It starts off with basically 3 commits all called some variant of "initial public release", after which good commit messages start, so that probably skipped many intermediate WIP states

I agree that one can do good commit messages also early on though. Initial commit can be "project skeleton", then "argument parsing and start of docs", then maybe "implemented basic functionality: it now lists files when run", next "implemented -S flag to sort by size", etc. It's not as specific as "Forbid -H option in POSIX mode" and the commits are going to often be large and touch different components, but I'd say that's expected for young projects with few (concurrent) contributors