Always squashing is a bit much for my taste, sometimes the individual commits have interesting information! Text from the MR in the merge commit is great though, maybe I should see if we can set that up with gitlab and propose that we start doing that at work.

Putting the message in git puts the information closer to the code, since the pr isn’t in git itself but instead the git forge. You can for example search the text of git messages from the git cli, or come across the explanation when doing git blame. I sometimes write verbose commit messages and then use them as the basis for the text in the pr, that way the reviewer can see it easily, but it’s also available to anyone who might come across it when doing git archeology