I do not understand why these metaphorical articles persist. They do not help anyone understand the procedure, which is simple:

    - Walk the commit tree backwards to the specified rebase point, writing each commit as a temporary diff file.
    - Set the current working space to the rebase target commit/hash/tag like `git reset --hard $commit`.
    - Apply each diff file in forwards order (that's the reverse of the  way diffs were generated in the first step).

Rebase is just a good shorthand for moving sequences of commits and (potentially interactively) resolving conflicts along the way.