Spending time digging through commit messages when tooling and design makes it harder, not easier, is a risky proposition if it turns out it was all fucking useless and you didn't find anything worth reading and are now even farther behind. Either due to the quality of the messages or a lack of your ability on your end to find what you need.
I'd love to work in the sort of environments these people seem to but it's just not been the case. I'm at a smaller company where I get to wear many hats, and coding/development is just one of them, but I know plenty of people at very large companies who also don't really do things like that because "putting in the effort" isn't rewarded as much as whatever arbitrary metric they're graded on.