I've developed branches against a moving target all the time where the moving target introduced a problem in my code that wouldn't have been found by a simple m

I've developed branches against a moving target all the time where the moving target introduced a problem in my code that wouldn't have been found by a simple merge conflict resolution. It's much much easier to find the source of the problem when you have the real history (a merge) instead of a rewritten history (a rebase).