gosh, wow, I want the opposite of that for any project I work on. In the last five years I have never used a merge commit and I love it. I'd honestly prefer a version of git that doesn't have em.
I like linear histories too, but if you have a production branch and a development branch you need merge commits between them.
But a long-lived branch needs to be rebased before review, because conflict resolutions need to be reviewed. In fact reviewing the version without the conflict resolutions is a waste of time, because that version probably won’t ever be deployed.
Do you have a better git workflow in mind than what is described above?