It's a trade-off. Many devs don't know how to do that, don't care to do that, will never learn to do that, and for them squash merge is a good option.
I would have assumed that a regular (not squashed) merge is more common, and easier to do, because it's the default behavior of "git merge". It takes extra git commands and/or extra non-default arguments to git merge to get a squash merge. My GitHub also doesn't default to squash merge, IIRC... Don't you have to choose squash merge or be told to use it, if you don't otherwise know or care?