Over most of the ten years I've been using git, I've been a strong proponent of merging over rebasing. It seemed more honest to avoid rewriting commits and more likely to produce a complete history. There are also problems that arise when you rewrite shared history, and you can avoid those entirely if you just never rewrite history at all. While all of this is true, the hidden costs of the approach came to play an increasing role in my thinking, and these days, I essentially avoid merge entirely. The result has been an easier workflow, with a more useful history of more coherent commits.
History tracking in a tool like git serves a few development purposes, some tactical and some strategic. Tactically speaking, it's nice to be able to have confidence that you can always reset to a particular state of the codebase, no matter how badly you've screwed it up. It's easier to make "risky" changes to code when you know that you're a split second away from your last known good state. Further, git remotes give you easy access to a form of off site backup and tags give you the ability to label released. Not only does the history in a tool like git make it easier to get to your last known good state during development, it also makes it easier to get back to the version you released last month before your dog destroyed your laptop.
At a strategic level, history tracking can give other longer term benefits. With a little effort, it's an excellent way to document the how and way your code evolves over time. Correctly done (and with an IDE), a good version history gives developers immediate access to the origin of each line of code, along with an explanation of how and why it got there. Of course, it takes effort to get there. Your history can easily devolve into a bunch of "WIP" messages in a randomly associated stream of commits. Like everything else in life worth doing, it takes effort to ensure that you actually have a commit history that can live up to its strategic value.
This starts with a commit history that people bother to read, and like everthing else, it takes effort to produce something worth reading. For people to bother reading your commit history, they need to believe that it's worth the time spent to do so. For that to happen, enough effort needs to have been spent assembling the history that it's possible to understand what's being said. This is where the notion of a complete history runs into trouble. Just like historians curate facts into readable narratives, it is our responsibility as developers to take some time to curate our projects' change history. At least if we expect them to be read. My argument for rebasing over merging boils down to the fact that rebase/squash makes it easier to do this curation and produce a history that has these useful properties.
For a commit to be useful in the future as a point of documentation, it needs to contain a coherent unit of work. git thinks in terms of commits, so it's important that you also think in terms of commits. Being able to trust that a single commit contains a complete single change is usetul both from the point of view of interpreting a history, and also from the point of view of using git to manipulate the history. It's easier to cherry-pick one commit with a useful change than it is three commits, each with a part of that one change.
Another way of putting this is that nobody cares about the history of how you developed a given feature. Imagine adding a field to a screen. You make a back end change in one commit, a front end change in the next, and then submit them both in one branch as a PR. A year after, does it really matter to you or to anybody else that you modified the back end first and then the front end? The two commits are just noise in the history. They document a state that never existed in anything like a production environment.
These two commits also introduce a certain degree of ongoing risk. Maybe you're trying to backport the added field into an earlier maintenance release of your software. What happens if you cherry-pick just one of the two commits into the maintenance release? Most likely, that results in a wholly invalid state that you may or may not detect in testing. Sure, the two commits honestly documented the history, but there's a cost. You lose documentation of the fact that both the front and back end changes are necessary parts of a single whole.
Given this argument for squashing, or curating, commits into useful atomic units, development branches largely reduce down to single commits. You may have a sequence of commits during development to personally track your work, but by the time you merge, you've squashed it down to one atomic commit describing one useful change. This simplifies your history directly, but it also makes it easier to rebase your evelopment branch. Rebasing a branch with a single commit avoids introducing historical states that "never existed". The single commit also dramatically simplifies the process of merge conflict resolution. Rebase a branch with 10 commits, and you may have 10 sets of merge conflicts to resolve. Do you really care about the first nine? Will you really go back to those commits and verify that they still work post-rebase? If you don't, you're just dumping garbage in your commit log that might not even compile, much less run.
I'll close with the thought that this approach also lends itself to better commit messages. If there are fewer commits, there are fewer commit messages to write. With fewer commit messages to write, you can take more time on each to write something useful. It's also easier to write commit messages when your commits are self-contained atomic units. Squashing and curating commits is useful by itself in that it leads to a cleaner history, but it also leads to more opportunities to produce good and useful commit messages. It points in the direction of a virtuous cycle where positive changes drive other positive changes.