> I have burned hours upon hours on rebase conflicts over the years.

Hate to say, "You're using it wrong", but if you haven't repeated conflicts rebasing, then your commits are probably just not small enough.

A merge does not magically eliminate any of the conflicts either, you just do them all at once rather than point by point. And the smaller the changeset, the less likely you will have any conflict at all.

Small changes, sorted lists (so parallel additions rarely conflict), allowing trailing commas (again to allow for parallel addition), splitting dependency updates from structural changes (to allow wholesale removing them if they were done separately), ... there's plenty of little changes to how you put together work that make this workflow easier.