I take it you haven't had the pleasure of working with your average ("dark matter" as they're called here) developers. I wouldn't call myself an "advocate" of squashes, but it's often the only practical way of keeping git history somewhat usable when working with people who refuse to learn their VCS properly.

I chunk my changes into tiny commits ("linter"/"tmp"/"wip"), but then rebase aggressively, turning it into a set of logical changes with well-formed commit messages. git bisect/revert work great with history written in this way even years layer.

But: most of the people I've been interacting with also produce lots of "wip"/"tmp", but then skip the rebase. I can only offer my help with learning git rebase for so long before it starts taking too much time from the actual work. So squash it is: at least it produces coherent history without adding thousands of commits into `--ignore-revs-file`.