> it also means the feature being worked on is becoming too big/too much in conflict to be kept alive separate for long

That's a really great point and something a colleague pointed out to me when I was musing about this.

Another coworker told me they like to do commits + occasional merges from upstream into their feature branch as normal, then when they have built up a lot of commits, use `git reset --soft master` and then git add/commit all changes as one commit, with a nice verbose commit message.

I really like that approach, if you have to do it.