I had to start reading that three times over, because I saw they mentioned “Canadian” and just assumed the angle brackets are a joke in reference to the Canadians in South Park:

A bucket of bytes. 🙃

Also worth mentioning that universities generally see themselves as research facilities first and foremost. They teach students, because they want to get the next generation of researchers.

Sure, they’ll also do job training to some degree, because it’s a good argument to get more funding, but yeah, just not their primary goal.

You’re right that there is a risk, that rebasing introduces compile errors or even subtle breakages. The thing is, version control works best, if you keep the number of different versions to a minimum. That means merging back as soon as possible. And rebases simultaneously help with that, but also definitely work best when doing that.

There may be reasons why you cannot merge back quickly, typically organizational reasons why your devs can’t establish close-knit communication to avoid conflicts that way, or just not enough automation in testing. In that case, merges may be the right choice.
But I will always encourage folks to merge back as soon as possible, and if you can bring down the lifetime of feature branches (or ideally eliminate them entirely), then rebases are unlikely to introduces unintended changes and speed you up quite a bit.

I don’t work with merges, so maybe I’m way off base, but I thought they meant, they’re working on another branch or fork, then merging the base branch into theirs every so often to get the newest changes, and then that creates multiple merge commits, which they can’t squash at the end…?

I’m not sure, about that last part, but the rest, I’ve definitely seen with contributors that didn’t know to work with rebases (and unfortunately we’re on GitHub, which only half-assedly supports working with rebases by default).

You might prefer working with rebases + fast-forward-only merges, if you want merge commits to be squashed…

(As in, there won’t be any merge commits. Your PR will look as if you forked, then coded real fast, and then opened the PR before anyone else pushed anything.)