That being said, I still don’t mess around with rebase for anything

Rebasing has a worse reputation than it deserves. It's something you just get used to - just like how git use is, when you started using it. There are a couple of strategies to make it easier and less anxiety inducing:

1. Before starting a rebase of a long branch, create a new branch. That way in case you seriously mess up, you can just delete the rebasing branch and rename the old branch to restore everything (you can usually get away with rebase abort. This is just added safety). Even in case of a successful rebasing, you can just keep the backup branch around, as a faithful record of actual development history.
2. Do only one (or max 2) operations in a single rebases. Do this over multiple rebases to get what you want.

After a while, rebasing becomes as simple as commit or merging.