I am now wholly bought into the idea of having a feature branch with (A->B->C) commits is an anti-pattern.

Instead, if the feature doesn't work without the full chain of A+B+C, either the code introduced in A+B is orphaned except by tests and C joins it in; or (and preferably for a feature of any significance), A introduces a feature flag which disables it, and a subsequent commit D removes the feature flag, after it is turned on at a time separate to merge and deploy.

I treat each feature branch as my own personal playground. There should be zero reason for anyone to ever look at it. Sometimes they aren’t even pushed upstream. Otherwise, just work on main with linear history and feature flags and avoid all this complexity that way.

Just like you don’t expect someone else’s local codebase to always be in a fully working state since they are actively working on it, why do you expect their working branch to be in a working state?