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Maybe version control is a cargo cult, then? You might as well just make commits without commit messages if the revision comment is useless. Maybe just squash all commits between versions so you just have one commit per version.

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This is a demonstrably faulty conclusion. Even without commit messages, version control lets you do things that you would not be able to do otherwise, such as to roll back a failed refactoring attempt, for example.

That is very possible to do. People overwrite their save data or their files without any VCS getting in the way.

It’s not like you need the history (is this a refactor or something else? doesn’t matter) so you don’t need to keep around such failed attempts.

It's still a substantial improvement to have known snapshots of the state of the code. It doesn't have to be in VCS, like you can roll it old school and save full zips of the code base, but snapshots are a tangible benefit that VCS offers that does not hinge in the slightest upon well written commit messages.

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