I also encourage everybody I know to write descriptive merge commits: "Merge feature X" instead of "Merge someone/master into master". It really helps when using

    git log --first-parent

to avoid displaying intermediate messages.

This really helps with the so-called "Aligator" [1] workflow: create a merge commit for every bugfix or feature, instead of just rebasing (you can still rebase if you want). That makes the history contain more metadata: a bit like a HN or e-mail thread can be collapsed to filter it out, first-parent helps filter the noise (implementation details) to display topics.

I wish web UIs such as gitlab's allowed to collapse commit graphs according to this.

[1]: https://euroquis.nl//bla%20bla/2019/08/09/git-alligator.html (no mention of first-parent in that blog post, unfortunately.)