Staging is an exception. Staging is a place to put low-quality drivers developed outside the Linux kernel community, to be fixed to Linux kernel standards before being moved into the normal tree. One of the many things done to a driver in staging is to fix the source code formatting. The commits won't get squashed, since it's part of the mainline git repository, which is never squashed.

So yeah, on staging you can expect to see lots of non-functional changes, mixed with functional changes.