I'll give you a counter example: whenever I change CI workflow for something that has nothing to do with the repo - like a new deployment scheme to staging - I have to go and ask people to merge/rebase from master into their branches or they won't be able to deploy. It happens pretty often and I'd rather avoid this.

To fix this problem you can set up you CI server to merge into the base branch automatically before running the code (in fact you should probably do this by default for other reasons).

This way your devs won't have to merge, they can just rerun their tests, which should be the same workflow as if your CI config is separate from your codebase.

If you tests are lightweight and fast you could even trigger this automatically