What happens if you push directly to a prerelease branch?

[hydrosquall]

Background

We were debugging why the Changelog marked the PR for our first next -> baseBrach PR associated a bunch of commits with the next -> baseBrach PR itself in the release notes (872), instead of the PRs that introduced those commits to next.

vega/ts-json-schema-generator#872 (comment)

Our working theory was that this is caused by using the "rebase" option when merging dependabot to next, which could be considered similar to pushing directly to prerelease in that it doesn't create merge commits.

Questions

1. The docs mention pushing directly to prerelease branches / not doing so will avoid unwanted behaviors. Is anything else affected besides the changelog categories / commits not having a PR to associate with?
2. Does using "rebase merges" have the same consequences for auto as pushing directly to a prerelease branch?