I come across way too many commit messages that exist solely to drive some sort of connected tool (CI, CD, issue tracker, etc.) or have some arbitrary character

I come across way too many commit messages that exist solely to drive some sort of connected tool (CI, CD, issue tracker, etc.) or have some arbitrary character cut-off, so the messages are borderline cryptic. Add the typical back-and-forth on design in repos and you end up with entries that don't correspond to what's shipped in the release. The reverse chronological order of messages doesn't help much either. And a surprisingly large number of projects don't tag their releases, so picking where to start reading from is an exercise in frustration. I find a changelog is a great place to provide a high level summary of changes and a good opportunity to highlight backwards-incompatible changes or API changes users should be aware of. If your commit messages are of the form "Fix #123" (without the issue title), it's also a good place to summarize #123 so your users don't have to cross-check everything with GitHub. I'd love to see a commit log that was consumer-friendly. But, as long as devs are writing messages within the constraints of other tools, I don't see it happening. Conventional commits is an interesting idea, but for those keeping messages to 72 characters, it eats up a fair bit of the message. Also, a lot of it ends up being noise that you wouldn't want in a user-facing changelog (e.g., "test:" and "refactor:").