Yes, our company squashes commits (we have tens or probably hundreds of thousands on the main branch). Yes, I routinely look at commit history. Commit history is also used for doing analytics for performance reviews such as how many commits did you make, what percentage had tests ect. For instance my last performance review made note that I had test coverage on 90% of my commits.

Also, we auto-stamp the PR on the commits so we can get the context. I don't understand how anyone could make sense of a large codebase when all the commits are added with the standard inane commit messages (e.g. "fix it", "typo", "name changes", "tests") that people do when building a feature. I routinely have to look at a piece of code, do a git blame, get the PR in the commit and figure out what was being done.