this is easily fixed by copy pasting the files into a new directory and never opening git again out of fear

One key thing that can help you wrap your head around rebasing is that branches get switched while you're doing it; so, say you're on branch feature and do git rebase master, for any merge conflict, whatever's marked "current" will be on master and what's "incoming" is from feature.

There's also git rerere that should in theory remember a resolution you do between two branches and reuse it every time after the first; I've rarely used it in practice; it would happen for long lived branches that don't get merged.