I must respectfully disagree. In this universe, nothing is linear in terms of how we perceive events and their simultaneity. If we consider a commit is an event, then who can say one commit comes before another? As in relativity, if both developers are working independently then they each of their own frame of reference. In effect, a merge commit reconciles those different frames of reference in its own discrete and well-documented entity. You could think of it as the equivalent of a Lorentz transformation. I understand the analogy is quite stretched here, but I still find it useful.
It follows then that if a merge commit is a genuine reconciliation, then a rebase is the act of one party rewriting their own memory in order to hide from themselves the fact that they were working in isolation and later had to agree on the actual outcome of events. Thus, in effect, rebasing ones code is no different than suffering from a self-inflicted delusion. That is, a delusion that we are all working in one shared directory or, to a lesser extent, that there is one source of truth as in SVN or other centralised systems.
This is, in fact, quite a sad thing our community. Many a developer -- while they may be using git -- are not truly using git in the way it was intended. They have limited themselves to their old ways of thinking and acting and, in the pursuit of what they have been taught is "the ideal", they have hidden from themselves the possibilities, efficiencies and understanding that might be discovered by the move into a world which can capture the fact that not everyone works in a single shared directory with immediate knowledge of each other's work.
We have to learn to embrace the oddity of a non-linear history because, while we might not like it, it represents what really happens when we write code. The better our tools help us model reality the better answers we can produce for ourselves now and in the future. Six months from now when we say, "How the hell did this ever work?" or "What the fuck was I thinking when I wrote that?", we'll want answers. If we choose rebase, corrupt our own memories and burn the reflogs we'll never know.