The author claims that "rebasing does away with the merge commit." It's true that if you rebase you won't need a merge commit, but rebasing is compatible with

The author claims that "rebasing does away with the merge commit." It's true that if you rebase you won't need a merge commit, but rebasing is compatible with the idea of having a point of reference between where branches come together, and you can accomplish that by introducing a merge commit with "git merge --no-ff" so the rebased branch doesn't fast forward on top of the target branch.