With the exception of rare uses of git blame (hate that name) to figure out who made a change so I can ask them if they happen to remember about it (and if it w

With the exception of rare uses of git blame (hate that name) to figure out who made a change so I can ask them if they happen to remember about it (and if it was more than a year so my expectation is “I don’t remember” which is fair enough)... virtually never. I don’t care if my git history is “clean” or “dirty” (if you never use a tool to make a visual of the branches then you’ll probably never notice or care). We put Jira ticket IDs in our commits and sometimes that’s useful. But the value tends to be in the content of the tickets as much as the commits. If we decided to squash everything more than a year or two old into a single commit I doubt it would affect us very much in practice.