I honestly don’t get why folks dislike rebase. I use it constantly, especially to squash commits so that my pull requests are a single commit that can be reverted easily.
I use rebase when I’m working in a dev branch. If someone else has pushed changes to the main branch, rebasing the dev branch on top of main is a way to do the hard work of resolving merge conflicts up front. Then I can rerun tests and make sure everything still works with changes from the main branch. And finally, when it is time to merge my dev branch to main, it’s a simple fast-forward.
Because rebase is fraught with peril, if you also push rebased branches upstream and someone else works off that branch.
If you stick to the rule of only using rebase on local branches that have never been pushed upstream, it’s an awesome tool. If you don’t, you’re eventually going to cause someone to have a bad day.
Yeah, basically anything that rewrites already pushed history and is then (force-) push is bound to create problems (unless it’s a solo dev only ever coding on a single device, who uses the remote repo as a mere backup solution).
It’s also kinda annoying to have a history full of “merge” commits polluting the commit messages and an entwined mix of parallel branches crossing each other at every merge all over the timeline. Rebasing makes things so much cleaner, keeping the branches separate until a proper merge is needed once the branch is ready.
