Search results for "how do I branch in Mercurial" always seem to lead to elaborate tutorials that suggest repo clones or bookmarks or numbered anonymous heads o

Search results for "how do I branch in Mercurial" always seem to lead to elaborate tutorials that suggest repo clones or bookmarks or numbered anonymous heads or smuggling diffs outside the commit graph using an extension. If the simple use cases don't include branching, that seems like a big problem for a DVCS.