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The main reason I request commits to be split up is for ease of code review. It's much easier to review three commits that each do one easily comprehensible small thing than one commit that does three things at once. It's also better if you find there's a bug -- you can bisect down to a commit that's fairly small where the bug should be easy to see, rather than one that's enormous and where the bug is hard to find among all the other changes.

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I think it is a matter of definition of "small" and "enormous". If you have a small thing, easily comprehensible, but big enough for it to be a complete piece of work. Then probably you also have separate task for it, and the change you introduce doesn't break the build. So it the end it's just a perfect candidate for pull request.

But note the comment above mentioned a commit for variable change. Or a commit for adding some comment sentence. Nano commits they are.

Sure, tasks should be small, easy to get, easy to review. But there must be a balance. Going to extreme, both ways, doesn't do any good.

indeed, if the commits are individually reviewable it is nicer. To the contrary however often these small commits can be a bit messy. Sometimes you'll find commits that are reverted later on, or fixed up later on. I.e. for commit-level review to work well, it's great if the history was polished.

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