It's not immediately obvious to the most casual observer what CHANGELOG is for, why reading the git log is insufficient, or what constitutes a big change. Also you aren't encouraging people to write nice commit messages, which sort of sounds like you've given up on having a useful git log, which makes me tear up.

In each of these cases where I'm looking for more detail, it's tempting to think I'm nitpicking, that it's sufficient to assume people will read the existing material as examples. The problem with that, in my view is that they also need contextualization (what is changelog /for/? Who is the target audience?) and honestly, some parts of the system really shouldn't be emulated. So some guidance around that would be helpful.