Totally agree. It almost looks like you are my colleague ;-) At any point, we have at least 3 different feature branches, which can be relatively long running

Totally agree. It almost looks like you are my colleague ;-) At any point, we have at least 3 different feature branches, which can be relatively long running (minimum 1 week), this is because we have a range of products sharing the same base platform. So when come merge time, well ... we merge and do not rebase master before doing that (well, technically we merge on an RC branch but that still applies). If we would rebase, we would have 2 teams that need to go through a potentially painful rebase process. Besides, on each branch, there are usually at least 2 developers, so it would be even more chance to have a problem for the developer that is not doing the rebase. Well, all of that to say that we just do a merge (with no squashing ...I really dislike a big commit, even more if it shares some frontend and some backend stuff in the same commit).