Not who you're responding to, but I also understand merge more readily than rebase. Your explanation doesn't really help.

Applying a commit "on another branch" isn't really well defined in my mind. In my understanding, a commit consists of one or more parent commits, and the complete state of a tree, including the entire contents of all the files in it.

Maybe there are other ways to be confused, but all of the uncertainty has been shoved into that simple phrase "apply a commit on another branch". What does that actually mean?