Struggling to Resolve Complex Git Merge Conflicts After Rebase on a Large Project

Hey everyone, I'm hoping to tap into the collective wisdom here regarding some persistent Git challenges we're facing. We're currently working on a pretty large, long-running SaaS project, and our team is growing quite rapidly. One of our main goals is to maintain a really clean, linear Git history, which is why we've heavily adopted a rebase-first strategy for integrating feature branches into our main or develop branches. It's generally great for keeping our version control tidy, but it's also causing a significant headache.

The core issue we're running into is frequent and incredibly complex merge conflicts, specifically after performing a git rebase. This happens most often when multiple developers have been working on feature branches that have diverged quite a bit from the upstream main or develop branches. These merge conflicts are not just annoying; they are becoming incredibly time-consuming and frankly, quite prone to errors, often leading to regressions or unexpected behavior that we only catch later. It feels like we're spending an inordinate amount of time just untangling Git history instead of building new features.

To try and mitigate this, we've implemented several strategies. We've tried using git mergetool extensively, relying on a diff tool to visualize changes, but it can still be overwhelming with large files. We also spend a lot of time resolving conflicts manually, line by line, which is tedious and introduces a high risk of human error. We always make sure to use git rebase --continue after resolving each conflict, but when there are dozens of commits to rebase, and each one throws up a conflict, it becomes an exhausting process. We even experimented with git rerere to record resolved conflicts, hoping it would learn and apply resolutions automatically, but its effectiveness has been limited in our specific scenario with frequently changing codebases.

The main challenge is that manual resolution is just too tedious and error-prone on large, frequently modified files. git mergetool, while helpful, can still be clunky when you're dealing with hundreds of lines of conflicting changes across multiple files in a single rebase step. Sometimes, the rebase history gets so tangled or we make a mistake, forcing us to abandon the rebase entirely and reset, losing progress or having to stash and reapply changes. Keeping track of changes across many commits during a rebase, especially when the changes are interconnected, feels like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded.

So, I'm really looking for some practical advice. What are the best practices, specific Git commands, external tools, or even team workflows that seasoned developers and teams use to minimize and efficiently resolve complex rebase-induced merge conflicts, especially in a fast-paced environment with a large codebase? Any insights into maintaining a healthy version control system under these conditions would be incredibly valuable. Thanks in advance!