'Rather than' & 'Instead of'

GMAT seems to prefer "rather than" to "instead of".

rather than : used for preference
instead of : used for substitution. It is generally followed by a noun.

Crick

Can you explain the above statement with an example?

The crux of the matter is:

GMAT prefers "rather than". General principle is to look out for other errors in the choices and if down to two , pick the one with "rather than"

https://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/rat ... t1177.html

Crick

There is no official question that I have come across in which options were wrong on the basis of using instead of or rather than..
GMAT does not test the difference between these two items.... Its just that these two items appear together in the options of the questions released by GMAT..
There would be better reasons to eliminate options that use rather than/instead of..

If you are absolutely left with nothing but to guess the option out of rather than vs instead of..go with rather than but again this is to be done only when you are guessing one out of the two...

Instead of is accompanied by noun whereas rather than is accompanied by sub-clause