Too much text. But what I will say is that the "good" merge workflow you posit really only exists in one place (Linux) and requires a feudal hierarchy of high

Too much text. But what I will say is that the "good" merge workflow you posit really only exists in one place (Linux) and requires a feudal hierarchy of high value maintainers individually enforcing all the rules via personal virtuosity. I've never seen it scale to a "typical" project run by managers and processes. Where the straightforward "get your stuff rebased into a linear tree" tends to work pretty well in practice. The rules are simpler and easier to audit and enforce.