You don't rebase it ontop of main after you've published it because that will mean anyone else who has checked it out will have to like checkout -f to clean it

You don't rebase it ontop of main after you've published it because that will mean anyone else who has checked it out will have to like checkout -f to clean it up. You just merge main in. Don't worry about extra commits that appear. PR tools like Github won't make people review them if you've done it all right, they can tell what a Merge Commit looks like (don't go deleting the auto-generated messages for merge commits unless you know what you're doing). Once you merge main into your out-of-date branch, it'll be up to date. And when you merge your branch back into main after the PR, it will work out. This is the standard way you would work on a branch with a coworker, instead of working alone. There's nothing wrong with merging main in. If you absolutely MUST have a perfect history of your commits on top of THE CURRENT state of main, start a new branch, start a new PR, IMO. Just don't change public history.