I certainly have used commit messages and seen others do the same. Perhaps this is more an indictment of the quality of the commit messages than anything else.
In my experience, rebase and squash makes it easier to collect work into meaningful groups and thus write more helpful/informative commit messages.
I can think of a few times off the top of my head when I referred back to a detailed commit message in a repo to understand why a change was made.
If I'm making a change that people are likely to wonder about, I tend to add comments. Basically, anything that's not obvious tends to get a comment, change or no.
I certainly have used commit messages and seen others do the same. Perhaps this is more an indictment of the quality of the commit messages than anything else.
In my experience, rebase and squash makes it easier to collect work into meaningful groups and thus write more helpful/informative commit messages.
I can think of a few times off the top of my head when I referred back to a detailed commit message in a repo to understand why a change was made.