If writing good commit messages isn't specifically defined as part of your job, why would you waste business hours writing commit messages that are beyond what is expected of you and frankly useless since nobody would ever read it anyway?
In my opinion PR/changeset description is exactly what should be in the commit description. In cases were we had 1 commit per PR (i.e. squashing before merging) just copying the PR description into merge commit worked really well - the goal for a PR description and a commit is essentially the same.
I wish github allowed to make the copying automatic and ensure that it happens (it doesn't, unfortunately).
If someone wants to learn the full history - the remarks during code review, perhaps all the WIP commits - they can read the PR/code review comments. I found it to be very rarely needed.
This is exactly how Microsoft Azure DevOps works when you enable the squash-on-merge behavior (which is how we used it while working at Microsoft). I thought this was completely logical and I'm surprised that GitHub can't be configured the same way.
All of our commit messages were nice, long and detailed, with a link back to the PR if you really wanted to go back and see the individual commits and/or discussion that occurred on that PR. I think I only looked at individual commits maybe once or twice since they were usually useless in isolation (woops, WIP, fix typo, etc.).
Writing good commit messages is part of your job in the sense that no reviewer should be approving anything without them, knowing that you may or may not be available if it breaks next year at 3 AM.
I put that kind of thing in the pull request, since that's where the review happens. Every commit links back to a pull request, and people actually do refer back to it. Writing good documentation there is part of the job.
No-one's going to ALSO write commit messages that no-one will see.
In my company we norm the titles of MRs, give it a ticket number and squash it all. If you can’t concisely describe what you did you need to split your MR.
