I will always prefer one of these ways of working over the other.

I have an extremely hard time to understand how the other is reasoned about or chosen.

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You can avoid having complicated git setups, rules, when to merge, when to rebase, etc, if you work to get your small commits that don’t break the build into main sooner. Instead of rebasing/merging 25 commits, get your code into main after 1-3 commits. The pain goes away.

Think you can’t work in such small steps?

I think you can. I believe in you if you try.