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Which branch your work was done on is noise, not signal. There is absolutely zero signal lost by rebasing, and it prunes a lot of noise. If your branch somehow carries information, that information should be in your commit message.

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I disagree, without this info, I can't easily tell if any commit is part of a feature or is a simple hotfix. I need to rely on the commiter to include the info in the commit message, which is almost always not the case.

But you are still relying on them to name the branch in such a way it encodes that info. It is unclear why this is superior to messages in commits.

It's worse than that: the branch name is lost after a merge. That "merge branch xyz" is simply the default commit message. So it doesn't matter what you do, commit messages are all you have!

Nothing stops you from doing both renade and merge commits.

Except perhaps crappy gui options in GitHub. I really wish they added that option as a button.

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