Literally no one looks through the individual commits in a PR that's gonna be squashed. I don't care if it's 10 or 10,000 - I'm always gonna review the full thing.
For an illustration of the scale of this, search GitHub for 'commit by commit': https://github.com/search?q=%22commit+by+commit%22&type=pull... (2M results)
Isn't your interpretation backwards in some cases? What I mean, is that _because_ you see the intermediate commits are garbage, you _then_ decide not to review the individual commits (because you are interested in the contribution anyway).
I certainly do care for the hobby FOSS projects I maintain, and bad commit messages + mega-commits won't fly at my day job.
Squash-merging has the advantages of making 1 PR == one commit with the PR ID in the commit message, sure, but it's unfortunately promotes bad Git hygiene (and works around it)
Sometimes when people speak rhetorically I'm baffled because I feel they literally do not understand what they're saying because they end up supporting an opposing rhetorical purpose. Yes you're 100% correct well-structured commits are a luxury that most of us do not have the privilege of experiencing because we work in high-pressure, deadlines driven environments where no points are awarded for beautifully crafted commit messages.
So in effect your argument is like "people that haven't had the luxury of a Michelin star restaurant don't appreciate amuse bouche and they should strive to rectify that".
You claimed that “literally no one” has a different review workflow than yours. I do, and my experience is that clear commits make reviews both faster and deeper, which is very helpful specifically in a high-pressure, deadline driven environment where being slow and wrong is costly. You’re of course free to disagree and work differently.
To use restaurants as the analogy, Michelin star-grade dining might be unavailable, and we might have to live the Olive Garden, or even McDonald's life. Regardless of which restaurant we're at though, if the food is moldy and gross, we shouldn't eat it.