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> This practice makes even less sense when we make PRs that once merged are squashed into one commit

Up until the point of merging, other developers reviewing the PR can see your development path, and optionally examine individual commits. In GitHub at least, these individual commits usually make their way into the squashed commit's comments as a bulleted list of changes (after some cleanup), which encourages better final commit messages in general.

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Rarely do I see people examine individual commits, perhaps because it is already established that PRs should small and branches short living.

The point about bulled list of changes is a good one.

I examine commits regularly, sometimes going way back in time. Maybe not daily, but pretty frequently. Usually, I'm trying to figure out why something is the way it is (so I know if it can be changed, removed, or whatever), and a clean history makes this exponentially easier.

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