Why wouldn't it? This is the "not rocket science" rule of software engineering: every commit must pass the tests. There's no special exception for merge commits.
The CI tests could take hours because of compilation time + waiting for hardware. Trivial rebases without conflicts got exempt from additional testing, because by the time the test finished, someone else would've submitted to main. Merge commits likely wouldn't be tested in an alternative workflow either.
Not a case of the company being too cheap to spend the money, because there literally aren't enough engineering prototypes in the world to satisfy our CI needs for testing on them.
Not a case of the company being too cheap to spend the money, because there literally aren't enough engineering prototypes in the world to satisfy our CI needs for testing on them.