Comment by skydhash

Rebasing is basically working at the meta layer, when you are editing patches instead of the code that is being versionned. And due to that, it requires good understanding of the VCS.

Too often, merges is only understood as bring the changes from there to here, it may be useful especially if you have release candidates branches and hotfixes. And you want to keep a trave of that process. But I much prefer rebasing and/or squashing PR onto the main branch.