I basically only use git merge like Theo from T3 stack. git rebase rewrites your commit history, so I feel there’s too much risk to rewriting something you didn’t intend to. With merge, every commit is a real state the code was in.
I’m okay with squashing consecutive silly commits before a merge, but having worked on a codebase that used the policy described above for a decade before I got there, I really, really hate it. Git blame and other history inspection tools are nearly totally useless. I’ll have access to commit messages, but when things have been shuffled around feature branches for a while, they end up concatenated into mega commits with little hope of figuring out why anyone did anything or what they were thinking when they did it. Some of this might be mitigated if stale branches weren’t deleted, but people don’t like stale branches.
If there are genuinely Git tools that can’t handle merge commits in <current year>, I’d be surprised if they didn’t have Fisher Price or Hasbro written on the side.
