I agree that:

- Human readers don't care about the details of everything you tried

- Commits that both don't compile and have no useful message are of very little value

But I don't think that's an argument against making small commits with uninformative messages, because making those commits without breaking compilation - or even explicitly checking that it compiles before committing - is much easier than coming up with a full commit message. And small commits that do compile - or even small commits of which a significant proportion compile - are very useful for bisect.

But you don't agree that it's better if those 100 tiny commits with messages like "x" and which all just tweak the same piece of code are cleaned up with some squashing and rewording before making a PR?

> But you don't agree that it's better if those 100 tiny commits with messages like "x" and which all just tweak the same piece of code are cleaned up with some squashing and rewording before making a PR?

Not unless they're literally just e.g. making a change and undoing it. In general 100 tiny commits with messages like "x" don't make human PR review any harder and they make (automated) bisect to find a bug better.