The author clearly hasn't worked on a project where the maintainers care about the decomposition of the commits and the commit messages
Make small commits, each of them do their own thing, each of them build and test successfully on their own. Most critically the commit messages should contain the motivation for the change. I love to cite error logs here to indicate what symptom it fixes.
It's a higher discipline activity but it's really worth it.
I think they do, but in a workflow where “make small commits” is now “make small merge requests”. When the merge request is squashed and merged, the message matters (which they say), but if you’re iterating on one small feature with feedback of CI/reviewers, those individual messages are arguably way less important, if only because they won’t become part of the true history
If you work on a repo with 120 teams across the world you spend your time making sure their stuff compiles and doesn’t break the build. Not that some guy actually made the commit history pretty.
You can have a 3 person team work with such policies. But it is unworkable for a huge repo.
It's a higher discipline activity but it's really worth it.