[sloowm]

The other option is someone scouring through the mess of commits to find out what should be in the changelog or you have to update the changelog with each commit to the main branch. Which brings you back to the extra step on top of things you need to do.

So this is a way to reduce overhead, you need to write a commit message anyway so why not reuse that effort.

"Simple" projects like curl use their commit messages for the changelog.