How is this in any way better or simpler than Git Flow? IMO Git Flow is conceptually easy to understand and easy to implement. Using it on a pretty decent sized team (40+ developers) and it works great for us - and is easy for newcomers to the project to pick up.
Rebasing locally before "publishing" (pushing) changes to the central repo is definitely okay. It should always be done before pushing the branch for the first time, really, because if someone else has modified develop since you started your branch, you want to make sure your changes are still working and won't break the build (on develop).
