I don't know about this specific situation, but it reminded me of something I've been trying to do more strictly in my commits/PRs, which is basically to ask for every single commit/change, "Does this need to be grouped with the larger PR or can I pull this out and sneak it straight in to master before the rest of the PR?" What that does is it minimizes the changes for merge conflicts and keeps the PR from ballooning.

In this case, for example, it looks like you had the very valid thought that you should change `autoBox` to `$autoBox` to adhere to a useful naming convention. After making the change, I'd think to myself—is this something I could git-stash and separately PR straight to master, or is it intimately tied to the current PR? No current action required, just food for thought.