All the commits for your feature get popped on top the commits you brought in from main. When you are putting together your PR you can more easily squash your commits together and fix up your commit history before putting it out for review.

It is a preference thing for sure but I fall into the atomic, self contained, commits camp and rebase workflows make that much cleaner in my opinion. I have worked with both on large teams and I like rebase more but each have their own tradeoffs

especially since every developer has a different idea of what a commit should be, with there being no clear right answer

EDIT: I may have read more into GPs post but on teams that I have been on that used merge commits we did this flow as well where we merged from main before a PR. Resolving conflicts in the feature branch. So that workflow isn’t unique to using rebase.

But using rebase to do this lets you later more easily rewrite history to cleanup the commits for the feature development.

  git log --oneline --graph --first-parent