For the maintainability of a large project with a lot of contributors, the quality of the commit messages is more important than the quality of the code itself. The code and the comments in it only contains the how and what is happening, and even those can get really muddled up in projects where something gets changed over and over again by different people over a long time.
The commit messages provide the why. They grant you a window to the perspective of the person who did the change, explaining why they did something the way they did.
For the maintainability of a large project with a lot of contributors, the quality of the commit messages is more important than the quality of the code itself. The code and the comments in it only contains the how and what is happening, and even those can get really muddled up in projects where something gets changed over and over again by different people over a long time.
The commit messages provide the why. They grant you a window to the perspective of the person who did the change, explaining why they did something the way they did.