Assuming we are not talking about rewriting published history – and nobody should ever really be doing that anyway, when multiple commiters are using the same branch – I presume this is a situation where the dev has multiple, unpushed features that are WIP, each in their own local branch and building on each other.

Yep. There are also situations where rewriting history on branches under review is ok and desired - systems like gerrit work that way. But not github (you can push to an own work-in-progress branch on github, or even push to a branch with a merge request, but the github ui is not designed to review that).

Especially large organizations favour history that is easier to read and mostly linear. This is not needed for a mom and pop web project of a company with three developers.

In respect to the number of commits per feature - one commit per feature can be good. But often changes can be compartmentalized in doing preparatory refactoring, adding the feature, adding tests, and his can be easier to review because the scope of each commit is smaller.