Not everyone who might be interested in your changelog will be a developer. Even developers don't want to go trawling through commit history to know changes at a high level.
Okay, fine -- but why couldn't you just derive a changelog from version-change commits which are meant for summarizing high-level changes in the version being committed? That way, you don't keep multiple sources of truth for version change information, while still benefiting from keeping a concise changelog without unnecessary commits in it.
