Advising rebasing over explicit merges is dangerous and foolish. Rebasing does have its place, but you really need to know what you're doing.

Also, I don't see his point about that messy history. I can see exactly what happened in that history (though the branch names could have been more informative). With multiple people working on the same project, feature branches will save your sanity when you need to do a release, and one feature turns out to not be ready.