Squash was the thing that convinced me that the emperor has no clothes. Realizing that I was going to either have to train every junior, every four-month community-college student brought in on co-op to modify their history in an awful UI with tons of gotchas, or I would have to accept the downsides of squash?

It's so stupid.

Git desperately needs a layer above the commit that groups related commits together into a semantically commit-like object that you can show in history and jump to its HEAD and cherry-pick. Because the squash is a dumb hack, and meticulously editing your history is not productive work.

I want squash. But I want squash without all the boneheaded implementation-detail downsides of squash. I want squash where I can put up a PR and keep working and then not have to deal with the cherry-pick pain if I want to build off that work after it merges. I want squash where I can leave the branch up after the merge and still see that it's behind the main branch.

But git's simple "everything is a commit" model makes that impossible.