I find that forcing developers to record and publish every little mistake they made along the way has bigger downsides than the upsides of being able to follow

I find that forcing developers to record and publish every little mistake they made along the way has bigger downsides than the upsides of being able to follow along with their thought processes as a branch or PR evolves. Similarly, I don't really care how many times you merged main in the course of developing on a branch. Those commits are just noise to me. As long as only a single developer is working on a branch at once, I'm very comfortable with them treating commits as a work in progress, then doing an interactive rebase before merging to main to clean things up. Even in the case where multiple devs are working on a feature branch, as long as they're coordinating properly (and using safeguards such as `git push --force-with-lease`), I find more value in having tidy, organized commits at merge time than a full history of the development process.