[wandernotlost]

> So I start by creating a few empty-ish commits that are roughly analogous to the tasks you'd break a ticket down into.

This is absolutely wild to me, and admittedly not a way I've ever imagined source control being used. I can't say that I have a fully developed opinion of it, but I have a feeling this would drive me nuts as a reviewer. It seems like you're using source control to craft a descriptive history around your changes, designed to tell a story you wanted to tell rather than the messy, authentic history that reveals the struggles you went through and problems you solved along the way. But by doing so, you're creating a fabricated history and losing the aspect that is more like an audit log. So I would just not trust any of it other than the outcome.

I simply don't give much value to human narratives about code, so that's why I prefer a messy history that's a reliable log of the steps you actually went through over a narrative history that might be nicer to read.