In addition, the size of patches can also vary quite a lot on what the author considers a "thing". Some developers fix multiple things at once, while some others think every nut and bolt should be it's own separate commit

Yes I believe in save early save often and don't bother squashing and have multiple commits usually in my branch before a merge request. We have another team member that religiously squashes everything down to a single commit on his feature branch before requesting a pull from his branch. We don't have micromanagers so that's just the way things are.