After using git for about 15 years, I still find "git merge" unpleasant and hard to track changes. I've always had better experiences rebasing my branch on top of the current main and then committing the resultant changes. Of course it helps if you are regularly rebasing from main rather than leaving it until the end, but the process still usually feels cleaner than with git merge.
The only downside of rebasing (for me) is it looks confusing when commits aren't sequentially in date order, and sometimes it feels like you need to resolve the same conflict several times (once for each commit that gets rebased if they touch the same code) but that usually works out better for me than a regular merge.
