Merges are the default state of life in any source control system with more than one person or machine involved. They are a regular, required need. Sweeping them under the rug, pretending that they don't happen, acting like they are rare is exactly the sorts of things that added complexity to systems such as CVS, SVN, TFS, Perforce and much more. It is exactly what adds complexity to so many of these rebase-only and squash-only workflows people like to constantly post about using in git.

Linear history is a punchline that ignores the reality of source control. The only truly "linear" history I'm aware of in source control is systems built on patch theory/operational transforms/CRDTs and that form of linear is subject to reordering and still needs explicit merge commits with (implicit) multi-commit dependencies even if there are few stated needs to visualize that as a DAG.

I agree with you, in general it is good to minimize complexity in life, which I why I eliminate rebase workflows and squash merges from mine. I prefer to see the evidence of where merges happened (and they should happen early and often), and graph data structures are very familiar to me as a software developer, including traversing them. (And git offers useful traversal tools such as --first-parent for when you want to view the DAG more like a linear history and ignore some of the noise. There's no reason to artificially simplify the DAG when DAG traversal is easy and accurate.)