Sometimes I want to take a subset of the commits out of a coworker's merge on staging to push to production, and then put all non-pushed commits on top of the production branch to form a new staging branch. I find having a linear history with no merges helpful for reasoning about conflict resolution during this process. What advantages do merged timelines give in this context?
What I like about merges it that it shows you how the conflicts were resolved. You can see the two versions and the resolved and you can validate it was resolved properly. With a rebase workflow you see the resolutions as if nothing else existed, you can't tell the difference between an intentional change and a bad resolution...
