I had a team that insisted on a linear history and was constantly rebasing things. This workflow strongly favors "just squash it all together" before a rebase to avoid re-resolving the same conflicts. This workflow often produces big patches that reviewers end up asking to be broken back up. This experience and a recommendation from my manager at the time made a good git GUI like sourcetree a daily driver for me. It's just second nature to review my own changes every time I stage files and quickly do a mix of staging whole files or "hunk-based", even allowing clicking to select specific lines within a hunk intuitively, rather than using the terminal UI and asking git to take a guess at splitting a hunk. I find a good git GUI invaluable, I have used sourcetree for years and love it. Unfortunately sourcetree isn't available for Linux, but I recently found SourceGit which seems to be a decent substitute.

Highly recommend trying a good GUI out, I think you would likely have similar ah-ha moments about workflow optimizations, and honestly I just cannot understand how people get by in git without a convenient way to visualize the commit tree (and yeah I know there is a decent command line treeview, but the context switching all the time in the terminal to go from viewing the tree or even the simple log to exit out and ask for commit contents just is so much more fussy and tedious).