I once saw something similar where a co-worker on a newly formed team wanted to keep design documents in a git repo. Those types of documents can have dozens of small changes, or in this case commits, each day. It was also painful to read and edit. Luckily our manager stopped the practice early before it took root.

Another anecdote, I was once in a tech lead role and spent a lot of time pairing and guiding others on their development work. My commits were low but impact was high. Low commits counted against me during promotion review.