I see merits in both approaches: Rebase seems to be good when you want to focus on the project minus the process, while merging seems to be good when you want to know the process behind the project. For larger projects with multiple contributors, I think the merging approach is better because of the process visibility. For smaller projects with one or two developers, a rebase approach could be "cleaner" when looking through the logs later on.
I'm interested to hear what other's opinion on the topic as well.
[0] - https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing#Rebase...