I was going to negatively answer your comment until I remembered that I have had [pull]rebase=true in my config for almost 10 years, so it have always been the

I was going to negatively answer your comment until I remembered that I have had [pull]rebase=true in my config for almost 10 years, so it have always been the "normal behaviour" to me. I never looked back to this. So I agree with you, the default pull behaviour that pollutes the branch with useless merge commits is plain stupid.