I think most of the author's pains could be implicitly solved by using tags on merge. That way you maintain a linear history, you get clear marks of when each

I think most of the author's pains could be implicitly solved by using tags on merge. That way you maintain a linear history, you get clear marks of when each pr was merged and you can see what happened in between. The obvious downside here is that you'd need to add yet another step in your process and come up with a meaningful system for this.