They kind of spoke to it. Rebasing to bring in changes from main to a feature branch which is a bit longer running keeps all your changes together.
All the commits for your feature get popped on top the commits you brought in from main. When you are putting together your PR you can more easily squash your commits together and fix up your commit history before putting it out for review.
It is a preference thing for sure but I fall into the atomic, self contained, commits camp and rebase workflows make that much cleaner in my opinion. I have worked with both on large teams and I like rebase more but each have their own tradeoffs
Yes but specifically with a rebase merge the commits aren’t interleaved with the commits brought in from mainline like they are with a merge commit.
EDIT: I may have read more into GPs post but on teams that I have been on that used merge commits we did this flow as well where we merged from main before a PR. Resolving conflicts in the feature branch. So that workflow isn’t unique to using rebase.
But using rebase to do this lets you later more easily rewrite history to cleanup the commits for the feature development.
You'll still get interleaved commits. If I work on a branch for a week, committing daily and merging daily from main, when I merge to main, git log will show one commit of mine, then 3 from someone else, then another of mine, etc. The real history of the main branch is that all my commits went in at the same time, after seven days, even if some of them were much older. Rebase tells the real story in this case, merge does not.
I think the question was about situations where you were glad to rebase, when you could have merged instead