Imagine a feature branch where someone has been keeping it up to date by merging main into it regularly. Now the feature is ready to go into main. You can easily `git merge --squash` that branch into main. You can likely do the same thing manually (as you point out) by running `git rebase -i` if you squash all the commits in the branch. But you’ll never manage to do a genuine rebase, where every commit in the branch gets turned into a clean non-merge commit onto main.
I do too, except in cases where it’s being used simply as a more complicated UI for `git merge --squash` and there’s no actual “generate a diff and apply it to a different base commit” going on.
That's a badly fitting analogy because there's only one type of flower involved. In this situation, they're saying that most things you might do with "rebase -i" are rebases, except for one.
I'll make a math analogy. Technically a rectangle is a trapezoid, but if someone says tries to draw a distinction between rectangles and proper trapezoids, it's not hard to figure out what they mean.
When rebase -i outputs a single commit, that's a degenerate case. There are statements about rebases that are generally true but not true for that specific kind.
