I can make 20 or 30 commits during some code changes in a morning's worth of coding. This allows me to easily trace back to any point, or cross-reference change

I can make 20 or 30 commits during some code changes in a morning's worth of coding. This allows me to easily trace back to any point, or cross-reference changes across many local branches, etc. At the end, it might all be squashed down into a single bug-fix commit for the devel branch. The commit granularity that's desirable and effective for an individual is very different to the history you want in the main feature branches.