I was trying to track down a problem in the nim-lang/Nim repo, and had a similar impression. During a `git bisect` run I thought I'd made a mistake as I saw duplicate messages pop up, until I realised there are an enormous amount of duplicate messages in the repo.

A lazy scan right now shows over a hundred "make tests green again", a dozen "fix(up|)", handful of "WIP", etc. And beyond that a huge chunk are just "update <something>". Even with ~20k commits you can catch duplicates in a single unlucky bisect session.

I think I've come to the conclusion that /we/ in this subthread may be the problem though. Loads of projects are like that, and hardly anybody else cares. I suspect it just depends on how you are treating your VCS; I think it tells a story, others seem to think it just a snapshotting tool.