Squashing is a form of rebasing. Nobody suggests commits should be too large to be useful, just that they should form coherent changes. Preferably self containe

Squashing is a form of rebasing. Nobody suggests commits should be too large to be useful, just that they should form coherent changes. Preferably self contained enough to be useful in their own. When you do frequent small commits, unless you are superhuman the majority of them false starts or contains errors. Squashing these useless commits makes the history understandable, and enables the use of tools such as bisect. That's what "please squash before merge" means. It does not mean you should do rebase instead of merge. There may be good reasons for that too, sometimes, but that's not the point here. Should you wish to enforce a linear history, it is still just as important to squash undesired commits.