The easiest way to think about it is that merge conflicts aren't something that causes operations to be aborted like they are in git. If you have a merge confli

The easiest way to think about it is that merge conflicts aren't something that causes operations to be aborted like they are in git. If you have a merge conflict or a rebase, conflict markers are inserted and everything continues. You can quickly see any commits that have merge conflicts. If some operation introduced them, you can go edit that commit and fix them. When you do so, the fix propagates forward automagically to all descendant commits. The benefit here is that the operation you were trying to do fully completes and you're never ejected into an intermediate state where changes are dropped into your working copy and you're expected to fix it right here and now before anything else happens. You don't have to unwind everything because you screwed up an earlier conflict resolution since everything is stored in history; you just go back to the commit you want to fix, make a change, and then jump back to the later commit that still needed some work.