The question really is whether the team values version control history with good commit messages. A simple test would be to make all commits with the --allow-empty and --allow-empty-message flags which allow you to make commits that don't change any files in the work tree and don't include a commit message.

If the team doesn't see an issue with it, then using those flags should be mandated since what the team is really interested is just snapshots of the codebase. Any associated message (the commit message) is effectively useless and ignored, so why bother even including it?