Rebase is a whole lot more powerful than just as a replacement for merge. It offers the ability to completely rewrite the history of your git repo. Discover how in this action-packed video.
Not sure what magic config changes you’ve made to your version of vim but gD does nothing in vi/vim on any of my machines. If anyone is doing this course and doesn’t know “vim-fu”, you can delete the contents of file buffer (e.g. for writing the new commit message when squashing all of the util commits) with :1,$d<enter>.