Yeah. I have never in my entire career thought "there are too many commit messages" when doing code archeology, but I have sometimes thought "damn, this commit is huge"
I have all the time. When git blame says "fix a typo" or when you look at a commit graph and see spaghetti.
I like `tig blame` for this. It has a key (comma, maybe?) that pops back to the file just before the change on the highlighted line so you can quickly work your way backwards through non-changes like you describe. It doesn’t deal with renames well, though.
Not really because CI only needs to pass for the final commit so it's super unlikely that the intermediate ones work.