In a gerrit flow, you have to use it quite often, but only on the detached micro-branches that gerrit forces you to use. And the UI provides a nice convenient rebase button.
In a more traditional "trunk" flow, where you're pretending it's svn, you probably want "pull.rebase=true", otherwise you generate a lot of entirely spurious merge commits. This really confused me the first time I used git, long ago.
The "dangerous" case is, as you say, using it to rewrite history that has already been pushed (heresy!). Generally the system will warn you that this requires "--force", at which point you need to stop and think about what you've done.
(It took me a long time to overcome my feeling that history rewrites were inherently wrong - defeating the point of a VCS in some way. I've adapted to it somewhat with the "neatening things up before submitting" view, which took a while to learn. In a traditional VCS there's only one view of the code and everyone shares it.)
In a gerrit flow, you have to use it quite often, but only on the detached micro-branches that gerrit forces you to use. And the UI provides a nice convenient rebase button.
In a more traditional "trunk" flow, where you're pretending it's svn, you probably want "pull.rebase=true", otherwise you generate a lot of entirely spurious merge commits. This really confused me the first time I used git, long ago.
The "dangerous" case is, as you say, using it to rewrite history that has already been pushed (heresy!). Generally the system will warn you that this requires "--force", at which point you need to stop and think about what you've done.
(It took me a long time to overcome my feeling that history rewrites were inherently wrong - defeating the point of a VCS in some way. I've adapted to it somewhat with the "neatening things up before submitting" view, which took a while to learn. In a traditional VCS there's only one view of the code and everyone shares it.)