[he0001]

Well, assuming that you are adding features in parallel you have an history. You have a branch with feature A and are about to build feature B, which is now based on A, someone else is building feature C which is also based on A. Building B and C might require different or equal changes to A.

There's no guarantee that any of these features will be built in order since they might have different priorities, difficulties or level of acceptance so it's hard to tell which one must or will be done in what order. Rebasing pretty much settles that while merging is much more sane to that workflow. It's harder to keep it functional yes, but it's enabling parallel development. Using rebasing and/or merge isn't a source control problem but a feature management problem.

[Vinnl]

Yeah I think my point was more that a blanket ban on rebasing is too rigorous. I agree that once you want to integrate B and C (or both into A), a merge is usually the best way to do it - and I think that's what TFA was actually referring to.

It fails to consider the case, however, of rewriting B's history internally, not as a way of integrating with A or C, but as a way of making its commits clear. Afterwards, you'd still do a merge of A into B and then merging B back once you see that's successful.