It's not a trick or workaround. It's a very straightforward use of a command flag on one of the most used git commands. It's even conceptually very simple, you're just rebasing a subset of commits of a branch onto a different parent. Anyone who has ever rebased already has a working mental model of this operation. Framing this issue where knowing a single flag on a command every git user uses every day to perform an operation they already broadly understand as some arcane knowledge and 'nonsense' is ridiculous.