What's wrong with squash-merges? As long as your merge requests aren't enormous, squash merges keep your commit history clean, instead of being polluted with tons of commits with the comment "fixed typo" when most of the real work is in a single commit or two. When I'm reviewing someone's MR, I do not want to wade through dozens of very minor commits that are probably already fixing the things I would have complained about.

And what's wrong with merge? How do you even use git without merging?