I think squash merges are a last resort heavy-handed tool for dealing with developers who refuse to clean up their commit history before merging. Most developers can do better by hand.
Git history should tell a simple, understandable story of each change. For example: 1) refactor existing code, 2) add feature. Or 1) add missing tests, 2) refactor existing code, 3) add feature.
But since you're working on the fly with imperfect knowledge, it doesn't happen in such neat steps. Refactorings and behavior changes end up interleaved in your raw git history, so you need to do a little bit of cleanup by hand in order to present a simple story in the commit log.
Of course if you have developers that don't do that and instead merge dozens of commits that just say wip, wip, wip, lol, fml, wip, wip, lol, yolo and you can't fire them or get them to change, then squash merges ftw.
Git history should tell a simple, understandable story of each change. For example: 1) refactor existing code, 2) add feature. Or 1) add missing tests, 2) refactor existing code, 3) add feature.
But since you're working on the fly with imperfect knowledge, it doesn't happen in such neat steps. Refactorings and behavior changes end up interleaved in your raw git history, so you need to do a little bit of cleanup by hand in order to present a simple story in the commit log.
Of course if you have developers that don't do that and instead merge dozens of commits that just say wip, wip, wip, lol, fml, wip, wip, lol, yolo and you can't fire them or get them to change, then squash merges ftw.