For long-lived feature branches that are the target of multiple smaller PRs, history should never be rewritten. I call these branches integration branches. I agree with you wholeheartedly that master should be merged into the branch. It's also so much easier to resolve merge conflicts all at once in the merge commit rather than iteratively for each commit. Also, the information on how merge conflicts are resolved is then preserved in the merge commit. It's critical however that when you merge the branch back into master, you use --no-ff. It gets really confusing when you fast forward master to the feature branch.

The solution for it being ugly is to look at main/master's history with the --first-parent option. This lets you cut through the noise and just see the true history of the main branch. Without --first-parent, you see a bunch of commits in the log that master was never actually pointing at. This is why it's critical that you use --no-ff when merging these 'integration' branches as I call them. It's important that the integration branch is the second parent of master.