Requiring me to do those changes in series as separate merges is the bureaucracy.

There is a reason pull requests and merges operate on branches, not just individual commits. It’s like you’re intentionally hamstringing yourself by saying these things must appear as a single commit.

Do I want every PR to be a long ugly list of trivial half-done commits with messages like “fix typo” or “partial checkpoint of encabulator functionality”? No. Does everything need to be hammered down into a single wad? Also no. There is a middle ground and people should be trusted to find it, and even to have their own opinion on where it is.