A lot of people have hate for rebase, but I've always LOVED it. I've always had way less issues with it than merge. Whenever I do a feature I work in a feature branch then just rebase it with the target branch (main) before submitting the PR and it is a really painless workflow I've used for years.

I really try to like git rebase, especially git rebase -i and at one time I even used a special tool to help with that. What I find is that I see a lot more merge conflicts than in Gitlab MRs, but it could also be that the tooling on my machine is suboptimal: switching between VSCode as the editor and using vim in a separate terminal for git. In vim I don’t see the current commit where the conflicts appear.

What was your tool? Was it more than the --fixup/--autosquash feature (perhaps your tool predated that)?