I am not sure it make any difference to the user at all. If you use a merge tool, it will present the conflicts one at a time for merging and re-basing.

If you are concerned about reading history, then a merge can give you more context regarding the commits. With re base, commits will jump between features. For example, You are looking at commit for feature 1, but the next series of commits are for a bug fix in feature 2. Next series of commits belong to minor tweaks in feature 3..