Yeah, I think over use of GitHub, which seems to encourage squash-merging, has led to this where a lot of people I’ve seen treat a PR as essentially one commit - because it ends up being one in the end.
If you keep your PRs small I guess the end result is the same, but even then I like things in individual commits for ease of review.
I want to see detailed atomic commits during PR review, and once it's reviewed I'm happy to have it squashed. If the PR produces so much code/changes that main branch needs detailed atomic commits for future reference, then the PR was too large to begin with, imo.
I do agree that this is a good compromise. For me, if I do a git blame and eventually can find the PR that led to change, if it has nice clean commits, that’s good enough.
Its not a if. it's necessary for the sake of people reviewing your code.
Unless you work alone on your pet project and always push to master you never work alone.
If you keep your PRs small I guess the end result is the same, but even then I like things in individual commits for ease of review.