It's not really destructive, though! That's not really the main difference.
The main difference is that a merge sticks around in your repo forever, a commit that people assume has no real code changes in it but actually sometimes it does. A rebase is done once, and then your git history doesn't have to deal with it ever again.
Yes, you raise a fair point that if you've dug yourself into a deep pit already with long-lived branches and overlapping work, it might be slightly easier to extract yourself from the pit with a merge. But then you're leaving that fetid pit in your repository forever.
When I said destructive, I meant in the literal sense, in that it rewrites history.
Don't get me wrong, I _often_ rebase, about a dozen times a day and it's been a core part of my workflow for 2 years. In that time I have learnt a lot, silently lost changes and ended up in a few mishaps.
I am in no way against the idea of rebasing, I frequently do. And personally, I often rebase && merge --no-ff. But, IMHO it's far too easy to mess up too that I'd adopt it as a dogma.
I also question the notion that VC history is best thought of in linear terms. I'd argue it's fundamentally flawed to force a DAG into a more linear structure.
In my experience, the desire to do this is to construct a DAG that's pretty in log viewer XYZ, rather than anything else. I consider this highly overrated. Just look at the DAG of the git project. Yes, it's intense, but the primary purpose of the history DAG isn't to immediately present a simple linear history.
Rather, it's to preserve a common, shared, decentralized history where it's easy to go back to a precise moment and see what was done to what and why. A dogmatic always rebase history is in my experience often a relatively pointless pursuit of constructing a git log --graph that's "simple" by default. Ie, rather than solving for the problem of "How to overview a DAG", the solution is to reformulate the DAG in a linear way which often conforms better to how we humans like to overview information.
Again, this is a personal viewpoint and I don't mean to pass judgement but I often find that such approaches, which one might liken to treating symptoms instead of curing the cause, is better solved the other way around. It's a real joy to delve into the git projects history, despite the fact that it's _littered_ with merge commits.
Basically, I think the quest for a "simpler" looking history DAG is somewhat overrated and not something I'd personally recommend pursuing.
The main difference is that a merge sticks around in your repo forever, a commit that people assume has no real code changes in it but actually sometimes it does. A rebase is done once, and then your git history doesn't have to deal with it ever again.
Yes, you raise a fair point that if you've dug yourself into a deep pit already with long-lived branches and overlapping work, it might be slightly easier to extract yourself from the pit with a merge. But then you're leaving that fetid pit in your repository forever.