To me it is weird to talk about readability when not talking about a specific tool. Can a given tool not make a history more readable by filtering out merge commits?
Exactly - it’s subjective - detailed vs clean - if you want every detail of reality, it’s not clean, it’s messy. Ever seen inside of an engine? It’s greasy, dirty, etc. a clean engine doesn’t run.
This is putting lipstick on a pig
Which can be fine, but let’s not pretend there is a perfect approach, needs differ
The information is all there. You can grep it to find specific commits.
This isn't a hill worth dying on with your team if it's their MO already.