I have spent hours rebasing on very active branches when a merge would've taken minutes (as many colleagues do) just because "it's a best practice" but I've never got to fully appreciate the benefits.
The main reason people want to rebase instead of merging is to keep the commit history from looking like a bowl of spaghetti. A commit history like that is hard to navigate, and more likely to contain a lot of frivolous edits.
I never need to rebase, or unfuck a botched rebase or go reflog diving - and the commit history is linear where it matters.
You should always do the easiest thing that gets you what you want, otherwise you're just doing pointless work. If you and your colleagues are happy merging and you find that easier, that's what you should be doing.
Rebasing supports a totally different workflow. With a rebase I can submit a well-formed set of changes for review that are conflict free. You can't do that with merging. With merging you submit a bunch of crap "history" that nobody will ever look at and the project maintainer has to deal with the conflicts.
Merge commits look like this (newest to oldest):
* Final tweaks
* Merge master branch
* Implement bar
* Fix foo
* Merge master branch
* Shit I did on Wednesday before lunch
* Implement foo
* End of day
Rebased commits look like this:
* Add customise option to UI
* Add use case baz
* Extend model to support bar
* Refactor model foo
If you want to do this but none of your colleagues are on board and you don't have the swing to make them, then I'm sorry. But you are wasting your time rebasing in that case. :(
The merge version looks like the way code is actually written in practice to me, so doesn't the rebased version take extra time to create after you're done adding code? E.g. the "Add use case baz" rebase commit isn't likely to be a simple squashing of commits from the merge version, but cherrypicking specific lines from multiple commits.
I fully agree the rebased version is nicer, but I'm not seeing anyone talk about how much extra time it takes. Or you're doing it in a way that doesn't take much time somehow?
I'm not saying that every single feature must be split into multiple commits. If it's one change then just keep amending that one change as you go. But quite often you'll identify standalone changes as you go, like refactors, little unrelated bugfixes you find as you go etc. When this happens I'll commit that unrelated change separately and rebase to reorder it so it comes first, then continue amending my feature commit.
The paradigm shift for a lot of people is not to think of git as tracking history. Nobody cares about that. It's useless to you and doubly useless for everyone else. Think instead about tracking changes. I don't need to know every key press, every dead end explored or what you did on Tuesday afternoon. I want to know what changes are being applied to the project.