> However, in more than a decade of software development, I don't think I've ever got much use out of commit messages.

> normally the commit message has no relevant information

Maybe that's why you've never got much use of them?

If your colleagues or yourself wrote better commits, they could have been of use.

An easily readable history is most important in open source projects, when ideally random people should be able to verify what changed easily.

But it can also be very useful in proprietary projects, for example to quickly find the reason of some code, or to facilitate future external security reviews (in the very rare case where they're performed).