I believe that "squash & merge" is the most useless possible git forge feature that never makes sense to use except in cases of blatant laziness or incompetence

I believe that "squash & merge" is the most useless possible git forge feature that never makes sense to use except in cases of blatant laziness or incompetence. Its only purpose is to plaster over the mess that people who don't know how to use git well make with their branches, and relying on it is always net negative for the utility of your repository. The only case where I use "squash & merge" is when I get some trivial merge request from someone who clearly doesn't grok git well and posts tons of fix up commits. When their change would boil down to a single logical commit anyway, then sure, I can click that button instead of asking them to clean up their branch - saving time for both of us. Otherwise, there's absolutely no benefit to it that I can perceive. Every reason that I have ever heard from people using that workflow could be nullified by learning how to use git a bit better, often bringing lots of other benefits to the table. (there's one exception - "GitHub doesn't handle PR reviews well" is a somewhat valid reason, but that's a perfect excuse to look for alternatives or at least to complain to GitHub to make them finally fix their product; it's not the only forge out there, GitLab deals with branches getting rewritten during review well)