I think you're missing the point. How a lot of projects operate is that the commits on PR branches are completely pointless since they will be deleted when the PR is merged and the PR description will become the real commit message for the commit on the main branch from the squash-merge.

The trouble is that Git is trying to do two things at once. It's trying to do remote synchronization as well as change tracking all at once.

An alternative is just to do "git commit --amend" every time you want to fix some small bug, but that has downsides in preventing reviewers from seeing what has changed between PR iterations as well as preventing you from going back to an earlier point in time for some branch. When you have less than a dozen commits, it is completely reasonable to just look at diffs and timestamps to determine which commit you want to go back to.