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This is subjective. Sometimes your change has to touch other things in small ways, that other code then depends on over time. Even if your project tries to avoid this, it'll happen to any big or old enough code base.

I think your suggestion is most useful for making code review easier. It's annoying to read 5 commits to understand a change versus just one.

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If your change must touch too many other things that may be a sign of tight coupling. Not a good sign. Maybe it would be good to think about splitting things apart as a separate lib, or service. Then you'd be able to make small, safe, changes that are atomic.

Decoupling is not free (especially long term, because it creates a new boundary), and when you decouple without any particular reason to do so, you often end up with more complicated code to do the same thing.

That's a fair point. Thinking more on it, you're right it is more about making reviewing old commits easier.

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