There is a middle ground between "retain the history of every typo anyone ever made" and "squash a month's worth of work into a single commit". Without having to learn a huge amount you can rebase your private branch now and again to squash all those typos and "fix the tests" commits into a single coherent commit describing the step towards the feature you're working on.

What I'd really love in that context is for Github's PR interface to surface individual commits better. I want to be able to step through each commit, reviewing the incremental changes towards a fully working feature, rather than have to review the entire thing as one big blob.