Do people out there actually squash commits? Granted, I didn't change many work places in my career, but at no place where I worked people squashed commits. What's even the point of it? It's not like people routinely read the commit history, and when they do, they really would like a complete story, not 20 gargantuan commits that contain 3 years of development.

I always squash my commits and at my current place that is even enforced via phabricator

Phabricator has a quite different (I would say better, others would say worse) development flow philosophy to GitHub/PRs.

Phabricator’s preferred model, which is heavily influenced by Facebook, is to forgo feature branches entirely and just stack many small changes on top of each other, landing as and when you want (this doesn’t preclude you working on feature branches locally, of course, because Phabricator doesn’t care what your local checkout looks like).

Because of this, Phabricator considers each diff to be discrete, and if you have multiple changes making up a single feature they should in turn be broken down into separate diffs.

Personally, I think stacked diffs are the killer feature of Phabricator. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a similar flow with PRs (recently we migrated from Phabricator to GitHub for one of my projects), you end up fighting against the tool a lot.

It's called ghstack (https://github.com/ezyang/ghstack)

If you want to learn more you can email me at [email protected]. Also happy to help you get it up and running - just put some time on my calendar at https://calendly.com/ericyu3/15min