you’ve probably dealt with emergencies by making a somewhat useless commit

I think this is an OK approach as well. Most people’s issue with it is that you’re left with a messy history. But you should be rebasing your feature branch before you merge back into master anyways. Simply squash those “saving state” commits.

But if you are using stash I would advise you name the stash using git stash save <message> so if you then have multiple stashes you can easily find the one you wish to apply.