Sometimes units of work that a branch would reflect are larger. I agree there are some branches that grow larger than they should, but often there are branches

Sometimes units of work that a branch would reflect are larger. I agree there are some branches that grow larger than they should, but often there are branches that involve a good number of changes, and breaking it into smaller branches doesn't really make sense either. There will always be branches where there should be multiple meaningful commits, and automatically squashing them all together just defeats the purpose of good commit messages. I don't buy into the idea that branches should always have just one commit or be reflected as a single commit on merge.