Yeah. While this narrative style tries to explain what things are done, it instead often leaves the question: Why are we doing this at all?

Commit #1 adds a helper function for whatever, looks innocent enough, implementation is correct. Believe it or not, it even has tests, lgtm. Then only by commit #8 do you realize this helper function is not needed at all and the entire approach is wrong. Happens every time.

I started reviewing these chains backwards and refuse starting a review until the whole chain is available. That’s however not always easy either, when commit #2-#5 has incrementally refactored everything into something unrecognizable, so that both the left and right side of the diff are wrong! No, I’m not interested in ”this will be fixed 2 commits down the chain”. I just want to review the final state that goes into production, nothing else matters.

Yes, commits should be made small whenever possible and not include unrelated fixes or refactors. Just please, keep them meaningful on their own.