The issue is that when you rebase, each commit in the chain gets re-applied, one by one. If you change something in an earlier commit that affects later commits, you could end up having to fix the same or similar conflicts several times before the rebase finishes (even with git's conflict resolution cache).

In contrast, if you instead merge, you only have to resolve conflicts once, for the merge commit.

That being said, I tend to be very fastidious about cleaning up my history before pushing, even if it means tedious, repetitive conflict resolution. But I do understand that other people might not think it's worth the trouble.

I think that can be resolved by rebasing onto the first commit of your branch to first make sure all the commits are minimal, and only then to rebase onto your main branch.

That said, I must say that I've personally experienced as a pain, so I don't actually do that.