In my experience, if there are no conflicts to resolve, then merge and rebase have near equivalent UX. Just a single command and git handles the rest.
However, if there are conflicts, I've always found them to be far easier to resolve during a merge than a rebase. That's not to say it's always easy, but at least with merge you only need to resolve them once. With rebase, you resolve the conflict, then have to resolve it again when git tries to apply the next change, and so on. Sometimes you even need to resolve conflicts bacwards if you're reordering commits. Much of this can be mitigated with git rerere, but if you're averse to merge, you probably don't want to learn about rerere either.
However, if there are conflicts, I've always found them to be far easier to resolve during a merge than a rebase. That's not to say it's always easy, but at least with merge you only need to resolve them once. With rebase, you resolve the conflict, then have to resolve it again when git tries to apply the next change, and so on. Sometimes you even need to resolve conflicts bacwards if you're reordering commits. Much of this can be mitigated with git rerere, but if you're averse to merge, you probably don't want to learn about rerere either.