It's correct that rebase rewrites history, but it's important to identify when it's not acceptable. If you are working on a branch that is shared by others (typically main), you should never use rebase. But it's an acceptable practice when used properly. I use rebase on my feature branches whenever necessary. If it fell behind the main branch I do git fetch followed by git rebase origin/main, resolve the merge conflicts and keep coding. I also use interactive rebase when I need to tidy things up before merging the feature branch to main.

Ideally I'm working on a short lived branch that only I'm working on in which case I do a rebase from origin/master where I also touch up the history in case there are any "forgot x in the previous commit" type of commits before doing a merge request. I won't rebase code someone else might have pulled, and I'll quit rebasing if I get any non-trivial conflicts .

I use rebase only to clean up some commit messages, squash commits, etc. - essentially to clean up feature branches I wrote. But never rebase to 'move' my branch as if it originated from a different commit, because I don't know necessarily know what changes have been introduced on the other branch (typically main/master), so rebasing on that would leave my commits in a state that they were never tested in, possibly broken / with unintended sideeffects. If I need changes from the other (main) branch in my feature branch (because of feature dependencies, or to fix merge conflicts), I merge it into my branch and can be sure that the commits created before that merge still behave the way they did before that merge - because they were not changed; this can't be said for rebasing.

It's not rebase vs merge, it's rebase AND merge.

Commit your changes into logical commits as you go.

Then just before submitting a pull request, review your own code. That includes reviewing your own commits too, not just the code diff.

Use rebase to:

• Swap commits so that related changes are together
• Edit your commit messages if you find a mistake or now have a better idea of what to put in your messages
• Drop any useless commits that you just end up reverting later
• Squash any two commits together where the first was the meat of desired change and the second was the one thing that you forgot to add to that commit so you immediately followed it up with another commit for that one missing thing.

Then, and only then, after you have reviewed your own code and used rebase to make the git history easier to read (and thus make it easier to review), then you can submit a pull request.

I rebase my dev branches on main to get rid of garbage commit messages due to me being lazy.

Squash and merge PRs into main, no merge commits allowed.

I think there are reasonable arguments for allowing rebase and merge to main, but it often doesn't apply for me.

Merge commits in main will break a lot of out of the box GitOps tools.

The cases where you can use git pull --rebase have high overlap with the cases where git rebase is sane.

The important thing is when to avoid doing git push --force (almost always; if your remote is a personal fork you theoretically could just create an infinite number of similar branch names for your rebases). Though there are edge cases involving local/SSH clones.

Please never rebase after you open a pull request. It breaks the iterative workflow of code reviews -- it makes it hard to see if issues brought up in comments were addressed or not.