Doesn’t that mean you have to fix all the merge conflicts introduced by your commits on every rebase though?

rerere can help, but OP probably has their own workflow

Git has gotten pretty smart about that recently: once you resolve a conflict, if you get the same conflict again it automatically resolves it the same way. Works for both rebase and merge.

if you don't have a merge from main into the branch further down, then git only bothers you about the most recently introduced conflicts conflicts --- the ones you'd have to resolve anyhow, and it remembers how you've resolved those.

You'd have merge conflicts whether you merge or rebase.