Finally, in one team, I more or less forced a senior engineer use merge (or rather, I was in control of the project and did not force other developers to use rebase). After a year, he admitted that he no longer really saw a benefit in rebase and switched to just using merges in his own projects. He also noticed fewer merge conflicts this way.
You mean - when looking at the history?
Incidentally, once you get used to jujutsu, you realize that the question is meaningless. A merge is simply the child of two nodes. It's a symmetric operation between the two branches. The thing that makes it "complicated" in git and traditional VCS's is the insistence in assigning a name to the resulting merge (so if you're merging into main, you want to call the new node "main"). Since jujutsu doesn't automatically carry the name forward, you see the "reality" of merge being a symmetric operation (i.e. you don't merge a branch "into" another branch - you are simply merging two branches).
That said, if/when stacked PRs become a first-class citizen in GitHub, more projects will see the benefit of this approach (though they'll probably mostly get there through squash-merges).
For a complicated long running feature branch I can see it. Instead of repeatedly merging the root in during development it can be cleaner. Tools aren’t always good at figuring out in a PR what was written and what was caused by those merges from root. And history looks better at the end.
For a short branch that can merge cleanly or perhaps very close to it, I’d kind of rather have the ‘true’ history. I don’t think it’s worth it.
I’ve never understood the “everything must be rebased before every merge” desire.
"For a complicated long running feature branch" always simpler to repeatedly merge main into dev, easier conflicts solving etc
For simpler cases squash+rebase as default merge strategy trumps leaves a nice clean history.
And then, when you pull someone else’s in-progress work to inspect it, you end up with their branches showing up with their names and you ended up with revisions 13564-13592 belonging to someone else and showing up in your history graph even when you continue on your own work at revisions 13563 and 13593. I ended up using temporary clones and strip a lot.
git branches, in contrast, are delightfully unobtrusive.