I'm not sure I understand. Why would rebasing ever be more complicated? They're the same thing at the end of the day, no? Main branch and my branch both changed this line no matter what, you must resolve that conflict.

Image you have a feature branch where you changed a block of code two times and are rebasing that branch onto main, where that block of code was also changed. During the rebase, you'll need to resolve that conflict twice. If you had merged main into your branch you would only have to resolve it once.

No matter how complex your branch gets or how much it diverges from main, you'll only ever need to resolve a conflict once. For rebasing you may need to resolve conflicts multiple times for changes you may have made hours/days/weeks ago.

If you're strict about rebasing and keeping your working branch clean and remembering what you were doing in that commit from three weeks ago the rebase process might not be that bad, but it can never be easier than a merge.

Rebase conflicts are like short-selling stocks; there's no upper limit on how bad it can get.

It seems there are 2 types of rebases involved here.

I never rebase a feature branch on top of the changes in the main branch. The branching point of a branch always stays the same.

But I use rebase for editing commits in my feature branch all the time, i.e. I rebase interactively one feature-branch commit on top of another feature-branch commit.

Merge conflicts are often much harder to resolve than rebase conflicts. I often find myself going through individual commits in order to understand how to resolve such conflict anyway, which rebase does for me automatically (especially with diff3), providing enough context right away. In many cases, it's much simpler to follow the changes step-by-step.

Sometimes I even ended up resolving merge conflicts by rebasing and then rewinding back and committing the resulting state as a merge. It was easier that way.

Sure, there are cases where rebasing naively gets super annoying as each commit conflicts on cherry picking, but you can end up with pretty nightmarish merges just as well if you're not careful.