I wish git worked like some of the other dvcs (bazaar/breezy). The default merge type from a branch should be a merge commit and git log should only show the first parent (commits directly on the current branch).

This gives you a very clean log on main (it only shows commits directly on this branch). There is no need to squash, rebase, or anything else. And if you want to dig down into individual commits that happened on a branch, you can!

This can be a bit replicated by forcing a merge type of merge and setting an alias of log to "log --first-parent", but since that isn't the default, that isn't what you see when you look at the commit logs on platforms like github.

I never understood why git decided to show a flat list of every commit that happened, even if the commit originally happened on a separate branch.