We go through ~600 commits per day. In my experience, there's nothing worse than looking for when a value was changed from 10 to 100, and finding it in a "Merged from X" commit with the history of why the value was changed from 10 to 100.
I don't often (ever?) browse the history, but I _do_ regularly search the history using tooling, (git log | grep <something>), and more is more in that case, even if the history isn't perfect.
If the original commits are:
- Change X to 10 by Foo
- Change X to 100 by Bar
- Change X to 50 by Baz
And that gets squashed into `Change X to 50 by Baz`, you lose the context as to why Foo and Bar changed it, and the values. If I need to go investigate an issue with X, I'd rather thave the history of all the changes.
I don't often (ever?) browse the history, but I _do_ regularly search the history using tooling, (git log | grep <something>), and more is more in that case, even if the history isn't perfect.