Not all people (and/or not in all development phases) granulate commits to something easily describable that is not “update code”. Having mass changes or flow of consciousness style refactorings in a single commit is absolutely normal.
An author doesn’t need to please a repo reader until they see a good reason to do so.
Indeed, that's how most of my project commit logs look like in the startup phase. Eventually i make a commit with a "MVP" message and then I try to go from there with meaningful messages.
Agree! The 'clean commit' is an ideal, not a reality. I just know that looking back on some of my own repo's that I should've included a little more reasoning context, if only intermittently..