If you're working on a large team, this becomes a more pernicious problem. I've seen rebases change histories to the point that whole branches become incompatible with master. When you have 15 people all merging branches into master, complete with binary files, conflicts are frequent and often involve files you personally didn't change. People resolve the conflicts to the best of their ability, but they have no idea why certain things conflict and bugging your co-workers every time you merge a branch is unrealistic. So we guess and whole features get wiped off the face of the repository.

My team now has a merge only policy and it's reduced the number of conflicts and borked merges.