In my experience I don't see them as mutually exclusive. Good comments in code should still be in place. In my opinion the git history should not explain what

In my experience I don't see them as mutually exclusive. Good comments in code should still be in place. In my opinion the git history should not explain what the code does necessarily but instead the nature of the changes that were made. In my experience projects are significantly easier to manage if commits are squashed into larger commits that have (1) a clear title, (2) clear summary of what was done, and (3) some link to the tickets in JIRA with the full details. In the short term it may not make a big difference but once you have years of history in a single project as well as many hotfixes or releases the better organization of git makes the project easier to manage.