I would dislike the first/referenced commit description as verbose as well. It describes a user or change drafting journey without ever saying concisely or separately what the commit actually does and why. If it at least had that summary up top in a first block or separated with --- separator it’d be much better.

I like the first part of the suggested alternative but I would never put a discovery journey into the commit message, or a “an hour of my life wasted”. I would put them in a MR comment - or separated block in the MR description with the intention of it not becoming part of the merge commit description.

The journey is not relevant to the code and changes. When you think of looking at it one year later, you can see the value of a description of the change, but I don’t see value in the discovery journey. The journey is more relevant in team-knowledge and workflow of how to work with the code base, and inter-personal team building.

Too much bloat of irrelevant information diminishes discoverability and conciseness of descriptive and useful information. It’s noise.