[lwall]

Kind of disagree.

As a developer who works with code base that's got a git history going back over a decade and lot of legacy parts that haven't been touched in a long while, written by devs who've long since left, I fairly frequently wish they'd been more careful with the commit history.

You do mention project context as being relevant, but if bug fixes and refactoring _can_ be decoupled, it's a kindness to pull-request reviewers (if there are any) to do so and keep PRs small. It's also helpful if something needs to be rolled back if the commit history is fairly coherent.

[Droobfest]

Well I'll admit there is still a balance to it.

I'll just say that the emphasis should be on clean branches and PR's much more than clean individual commits. And on good code much more than clean git branches.

If there's too much ceremony around branches and pull requests I tend to avoid small fixes because it's just much work and that definitely doesn't improve the quality of the code.

[slingnow]

Why are you comparing advice meant for _solo projects_ to a 10 year old legacy codebase written by many different developers?