I would advocate for using each tool, where it makes sense, to achieve a more intelligible graph. This is what I’ve been moving towards on my personal projects (am solo). I imagine with any moderately complex group project it becomes very difficult to keep things neat.
In order of expected usage frequency:
- Rebase: everything that’s not 2 or 3. keep main and feature lines clean.
- Merge: ideally, merge should only be used to bring feature branches into main at stable sequence points.
- Squash: only use squash to remove history that truly is useless. (creating a bug on a feature branch and then solving it two commits later prior to merge).
History should be viewable from log --all --decorate --oneline --graph; not buried in squash commits.
I would auction shelf space at my mega chain grocery store to large brands. The highest bidder would have the opportunity to buy up all the shelf space in order to bury any potential competition. The bidder could create 100s of different labels of essentially the same goddamn product, in order to maintain the illusion of choice, maximize consumer confusion, and thus maximize the time a customer spends thinking about the shelf-dominant brand, for some otherwise dead-simple purchase, such as toothpaste.