If your projects is mostly write-only, merging master into branch is the way to go. This keeps entry bar low, and team velocity high.
If you expect many people to read project’s history, it is worth learning how to rebase so that each individual commit has a clear purpose and can be understood standalone. A few minutes taken by rebase will save many much more time of your future source code readers.
With rebasing, it seems to me to be easier to maintain a clean history (no merge commits) since all merges end up being fast forward, with the added benefit that I can deal with any conflicts as and when they come up rather than fixing them all at once when I eventually merge to master.