Ah gotcha.

like to rebase after fetching and before pushing. IMO that's the most sensible way to use it even in teams that generally prefer merge.

What do you mean? Like not pushing at all until you're making the MR? Because if the branch has ever been pushed before and you rebase, you're gonna need to force push the branch to update it.

Personally I'm constantly rebasing (like many times a day) because I maintain a clean commit history as I develop (small changes to things I did previously get commits and are added to the relevant commit as a fixup during interactive rebasing). I also generally keep a draft MR up with my most recent work (pushing at end of day) so that I can have colleagues take a look at any point if I want to validate anything about the direction I'm taking before continuing further (and so CI can produce various artifacts for me).

It's also not obvious to beginners since pull is defaulted to fetch+merge.

Yeah, pull should definitely be --ff-only by default and it's very unfortunate it isn't. Merging on pull is kind of insane behavior that no one actually wants.