Good commit hygiene is considered a best practice. GitLab should encourage and enable these kinds of best practices. This feature currently creates a problem and requires workarounds that remove information, or significant manual work.

The commit message should always have some explanation, see https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/CommitMessages.

I encourage people to write good commit messages, with a good description that explains what it does.

It seems weird to me that we are trying to enforce commit messages when they are not really visible or used in the GitLab workflow at all. This is what you see most of the time when interacting with the commit list. I've taken time to compose a nice descriptive body and it is hidden by default:

which might or might not be useful depending on what is the content of the commit.

One way of encouraging users to create good commit message would be to have a better integration with the content of commit message in GitLab itself,