[kelnos]

Even if it's true that essentially zero people read complex commit messages, that one person who needs to read it, 2 years later, will really appreciate its existence.

To me a commit message isn't there so someone can sit around and read commit messages to tell themselves a story. It's there in the -- hopefully unlikely -- possibility that there's a problem with the change, and someone needs to come back to it later, with no context, and understand why it was made so they can figure out what needs to be done.

I've absolutely used commit messages when debugging, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.