My thought is that these WIP comments remain in the log once a branch is merged into master (shared with the team) and it feels like a messy paper trail. I am

My thought is that these WIP comments remain in the log once a branch is merged into master (shared with the team) and it feels like a messy paper trail. I am personally a fan of commit squashing, particularly small feature branches and/or when the commits in question are temporary like this. I try to leave a really clean commit log on each branch I work on knowing that it will be merged eventually. Sometimes I'll interactive rebase or rewrite history on these to make it that way. Not everyone believes in that approach though.