yep exactly this. I found early on while having to work with perforce and using timelapse view (git blame but with a nice gui) that lots of intermediary commits

yep exactly this. I found early on while having to work with perforce and using timelapse view (git blame but with a nice gui) that lots of intermediary commits like this generate enough noise to discourage even the most determined sleuth from using commit history to solve a crime. Well scoped and well sized commits, squashed, and in my personal preference rebased, provide a commit history that's segregated on actual tickets/stories/features/fixes that I find are navigatable very far back. I'd say squash usage is very much case by case. But yeah equating a feature like squash to large commits is a fallacy. It's a useful tool imo that can be misused, but that doesn't mean the tool is "bad".