My exact experience (in the context of "merging upwards"). Large merges are a huge pain to do, and are basically impossible to review, too.
Though, of course, rebasing is a win in general, even if you happen to have an awesome CR tool (a unicorn I've yet to run into).
Because you're unpushed commits are on top, it's easy to isolate each set of merge conflicts (since you're going commit by commit) and to find the source of the conflicts upstream (with log/blame tools, without having to chase branch and merge histories).