Maybe I'm projecting, but I think the main point of doing a --rebase on every pull is that if you have upwards of 20 or so developers constantly doing a pull without a rebase, you will have a lot of merge commits that are essentially worthless. Especially because they'll probably just be the default message.
So, sure, falling back to the merge when things went wrong is ok and all, but odds are high you should go ahead and relook at all of your commits anyway. (Another thing, doesn't the rebase keep the initial author date? It isn't like the history is completely fabricated at this point.)
Of course, I'm a big fan of git rebase -i to do some basic cleanup of your commits before pushing. Leave an excessive amount of log messages in? Rebase them out. Neglect basic documentation since you weren't sure if things were going to change? Rebase them in. Sure, I can sympathise with the "you are messing with history" argument, but I find it challenging to believe that I actually care that you commented last. Or that you actually had a few extra helper classes at some point. etc.
What's worse than all the worthless merge commits is merge commits with actual functional changes introduces while resolving merge conflicts, but still with just the default merge commit message.
So, sure, falling back to the merge when things went wrong is ok and all, but odds are high you should go ahead and relook at all of your commits anyway. (Another thing, doesn't the rebase keep the initial author date? It isn't like the history is completely fabricated at this point.)
Of course, I'm a big fan of git rebase -i to do some basic cleanup of your commits before pushing. Leave an excessive amount of log messages in? Rebase them out. Neglect basic documentation since you weren't sure if things were going to change? Rebase them in. Sure, I can sympathise with the "you are messing with history" argument, but I find it challenging to believe that I actually care that you commented last. Or that you actually had a few extra helper classes at some point. etc.