There is a middle ground between "retain the history of every typo anyone ever made" and "squash a month's worth of work into a single commit". Without having to learn a huge amount you can rebase your private branch now and again to squash all those typos and "fix the tests" commits into a single coherent commit describing the step towards the feature you're working on.
What I'd really love in that context is for Github's PR interface to surface individual commits better. I want to be able to step through each commit, reviewing the incremental changes towards a fully working feature, rather than have to review the entire thing as one big blob.
It already does that. Click on the individual commit to only see those changes, then click next to continue. That's the only way I review commits, and it has been available for at least a few years
What I'd really love in that context is for Github's PR interface to surface individual commits better. I want to be able to step through each commit, reviewing the incremental changes towards a fully working feature, rather than have to review the entire thing as one big blob.