[kazinator]

The linear part of the history is objectively better than if that same change were collapsed into a single patch bomb.

Git rebase does not destroy history, it just does not link it together. That might be a bad thing. But the individual commits all making an appearance on the destination branch is a good thing.

From those who favor merge, what is bad is that there are no second parent pointers tracking where those changes came from.

This coulid be obtained by reimplementing git rebase as a sequence of merges. Git rebase is a sequence of zero or more cherry picks, not merges. If git rebase merged each commit instead of cherry picking, each commit would have a parent pointing to its original.

In a git bisect, there would be no need to chase those second parents; you would be looking for which merged commit introduced the breakage, and not care about its original, except in some rare situations where you want to analyze more deeply what went wrong (and then that parent pointer would be a bit handy).