> reads intermediate commit messages

> every commit must compile

I’m in the opposite camp. Following these two practices often doesn’t make any difference but the few times it did saved me a ton of time.

Dropping commits or rebasing is much easier when you have descriptive, atomic commits. It’s also helpful when performing git blame archeology to try and understand why this code looks so weird and has no context. It’s also useful when bisecting (not so much a problem with small PRs, quite handy as they grow bigger and bigger)

As with everything it’s about context and circumstances. As you gain expérience you can appreciate and gauge when it’s required. When you don’t have the expérience then you follow rules so that you gain said expérience. That’s how I see it.