I came into the comments specifically to ask if this flag existed. I feel bad that the author developed this whole flow just because they didn't know about this, but that's pretty common with git.

Thanks. This is going to be so useful, but it pains me to know I could have been using —update-refs for the last three years.

I used to dutifully read release notes for every git release, but stopped at some point. Apparently that point was more than three years ago.

Exactly, I was reading the blog and wondering the whole time how it's better than --update-refs, which I have been using a lot recently.

Yep. I set this in .gitconfig

I'm guilty lol. I wrote a helper to do rebase chains like this