Some additional context on this:

- There are additional organizational and process mechanics in-play that are out-of-scope for just a write-up on commit messages

- The team is made up of around 15 people supporting around 400 repos and about 8 live products

- The team DOES NOT use pull requests. Contributors are expected to be socially capable and fully engaged in the inter-personal, realtime communication that supports high-performance, low-handoff work.

- The ticketing system is NOT the primary means of communication between team members. It's merely a catalog of work items with only high-level supporting notes. A work item, as the old saying goes, is a "placeholder for a conversation", rather than a work order that can be executed upon by a contributor operating in isolation.

- The original author is describing an exceptional software product organization. He's not debating the merits of various subjective perspectives on what kind of personal flair might drive the content of commit messages. Instead, he's describing one small piece of a methodology that explicitly discourages personal flair and explicitly encourages (and provides supports for) direct communication, and rigorous attention to the team's well-considered, proven, and communicated norms.

- Contributors on the team are expected to maintain their own work logs in the spirit of engineer's logs from engineering industries. If the "why" of a change is important, it will be recorded in the work log. Senior technical leaders (at a minimum) keep up with the individual work logs looking for hazards and maintaining an understanding of the learning that's taking place in the team.

- Contributors on the team are expected to maintain equipment logs for the components that they're making changes to. This isn't the same thing as a SCM log, as an SCM log is for the SCM, not the product under development.

- The reason that the "subject-first" approach is used is to get contributors to talk specifically to the impacts made to the software itself, rather than talk about themselves and their labors. It's about training developers (and designers, and operators, etc) to be more objective about the work they do, and to communicate it in an objective way. Mentions of "changed", "fixed", etc, are records from the perspective of the worker, not the product. When scanning the list of changes made to a work product, the team members are primarily interested in the impacts to that piece of equipment first and foremost. The work product change logs are voiced in terms of the work product, and not the worker. Again, the reflections, learning, questions, observations, etc, of the humans involved in the work go into the human's own logs, and are supported by the person-to-person processes that are beyond the scope of the article on commit messages.

- These 15 people with their 400 repos and 8 live products was winning industry awards within a couple months of go-live within the first year of the team's charter. There's nothing average about the team, the product, and the methods in-play. The commit messages are just one detail of the finely-honed process and culture that were intentionally designed, socialized, and painstakingly-supported to achieve its objectives.

- The author of the article is describing one facet of an overall product development system for a high-performance software organization. He's not trying to spark a dialog about the myriad opinions of how commit messages are written across the breadth of software development within processes and cultures that may not go much beyond the cross-referencing of items between ticketing systems with an SCM system, which is arguably a higher-ceremony approach from an artifacts perspective, but also a "bare minimum" from a process and culture perspective.

It's not entirely pertinent, but just in case there's some question as to whether this work is being done in a business of some scale or other at some particular time or other in a business's lifecycle that accounts for how the development system works, and whether it's a special case: the business context of team's work is a $1B multi-national with about 2,000 employees working in the regulatory side of corporate law, finance, and venture capital.

The business context isn't the enabling factor or the deciding factor. The product development system in-effect is the key factor, and it was shaped explicitly for its outcomes irrespective of the business context. The development system has been used at various companies up-and-down the axis of business scale and scope.

The single greatest contributing factor of the team and its work is that they carry very little technical debt, and the methodology required to work this way touches every molecule of process, organization, and culture. It would not be recognizable from the perspective of typical mid-curve software development, and it would not be understood by examining any single process element in isolation.