I tend to stay away from more complex version control commands and workflows, as they often create more problems than they solve, especially if not everybody on board ‘gets it’. Rebasing with git however always felt natural to me: you get pull in changes from a remote and you reapply your own on top of that, instead of producing extra merge commits.
Here’s a visual explanation of what happens when you use git --rebase, especially when pulling from a different branch. Short version: don’t do it, unless you hate your colleagues. When pulling from the same branch as the one you are working on it is fine however (or if you know you are the only one working on your branch).