When I hear 'no-rebasing' I hear 'no-rebasing after you've done a PR'. That's when my code and commits are ready for others. My ongoing commits are often more notes to myself as I find those more useful during the work but make no sense as pushed commit messages where you need to block things off logically. Organizing your commits is not much different than organizing your code into modules. Something that should be done purposefully and with forethought.

To clarify, this wasn't an enforced hard-rule, but instead just a written down style guide. Style guides can always be broken for good reason, but it's the sort of thing that a code reviewer might comment on or discourage. Generally rebasing before opening a PR was considered to be fine.