In my opinion, yes, but like everything else it's not a hard rule. But especially for refactoring I really really want to read a comprehensive story of granular

In my opinion, yes, but like everything else it's not a hard rule. But especially for refactoring I really really want to read a comprehensive story of granular enough (but not too much) commits which logically follow each other, instead of a code dump with commit message 'bugfix'. That, plus just looking at the default graphical representation most git tools out there produce for merges vs simple rebased history: yes I'll take the latter.