Honestly if the tooling were better at keeping upstream on the left I wouldn't mind as much but IIRC `git pull` puts your branch on the left which means walking

Honestly if the tooling were better at keeping upstream on the left I wouldn't mind as much but IIRC `git pull` puts your branch on the left which means walking history requires analysing each merge commit to figure out where history actually is vs where a temporary branch is. That is my main problem with merge, I think the commit ballooning is annoying too but that is easier to ignore.