alt Hacker NewsRebase is scary if you are conflicting on many items.
I have a simple rule where if the rebase cannot be solved within a few commit rewrites that I will restart the branch from latest master.
If you are suffering from really difficult rebase scenarios, it's likely that the senior developers are more at fault than the junior developers. The way you organize work over the codebase has the biggest impact on how things would conflict. If nothing ever does, rebasing is a trivial operation.
There's nothing scary about conflicts on cherry-picked commits. It's just sometimes tedious to resolve them one-by-one, and sometimes may just not be worth the effort if it can be done in a better way.