It's not a false dichotomy. They're just using different terms than you would, based on their experience with how the people around them use those systems.
>I loathe GitHub PRs because of this. Working at $dayjob the unit of change is the commit, and every commit is reviewed and signed off by at least 1 peer.
Because this is exactly what a squash merged PR is. There is no meaningful difference unless you say "but commits are done by good people and PRs are done by bad people".
They make it very clear that they are praising small commits, and squash merge commits are usually not small. Squashing is the opposite of what they want.
The preference they have is not exactly a problem with github PRs, but github PRs are much more likely to review a big pile of code at once.
The amount of code being reviewed at once is a meaningful and extremely objective measure, and that's the thing they're concerned with. Not who made it.