The “long lived feature branch” approach is kind of the entire problem that leads to merge hell though. Having long lived branches is at odds with the rebase centric style and that’s intentional. Rebasing incentivises keeping branches small and getting stuff into main as often as possible. Basically it’s about using git in a “trunk” style.
The next question is “what if I don’t want this code to go live yet” to which the usual answer is “feature toggles”
People get very dogmatic about this stuff haha. I’ve worked in teams that were very hype about using rebasing and teams that could easily handle long lived feature branches. The difference is the latter kind of team weren’t all trying to edit the same files at the same time. Hmm. So yeah I guess what works best is situational!
EDIT: I just realised this is a gamedev community whereas the above comment is based on my experience in the “enterprise business factory” dev world. Might be a bit different over here, not sure!