Your personal preference for how a tool should be used is not the same as using the tool effectively. Pull requests aren't even an inherent part of the Git work

Your personal preference for how a tool should be used is not the same as using the tool effectively. Pull requests aren't even an inherent part of the Git workflow, and not all projects prefer short-lived topic branches. From the OP's other comment, it sounds like this merge strategy was the preference of the repository owner. Why substitute your own preferences for theirs? ETA: Also note that the PR was reviewed several times over the summer. GitHub has a feature that allows you to only review changes to a PR since the last time you reviewed. You can also manually use `git diff` to review that difference.