[lolinder]

> creating an entirely new history that nobody has ever actually examined

I think the confusion here is that you're assuming that OP's commit history looks like yours, with dozens of commits per PR that no one could possibly examine in detail with each rebase. At least for me, since I'm okay with rewriting history on local branches, I have a very small number of commits that do get examined each time I rebase.

I average 3-4 commits per PR. There's usually one that refactors the existing code to lay the foundation for a new feature, maybe one that just moves a few files around (to ensure git recognizes them as moves and not delete/recreate), and 1-2 that introduce the new feature.

When I rebase on main, I examine the diff for each commit before pushing to my branch. If something has meaningfully changed, then I adjust the commits appropriately.

My commits aren't a history of what actually happened, they're a description of the steps that it takes to add a feature to (or fix a bug in) main. If main changes in a way that introduces a conflict, I want to reevaluate each step that I'd previously laid out.