I basically follow the same protocol as you up to this point: > Once we release, we tag, merge into master, and start over again. If any issues show up on prod

I basically follow the same protocol as you up to this point: > Once we release, we tag, merge into master, and start over again. If any issues show up on production, we use the hotfix branch, hotfix/x.y.z. That let's us resolve issues with risking a ship of any of the changes that have come into develop that haven't had a few days of stability behind it. In our case, there's no point in a hotfix branch because master is always considered stable. You don't merge to master unless you're ready for that code to hit production. Feature gates are used for hiding live code when necessary for marketing announcements or if the feature simply isn't ready for actual customer usage yet (sometimes we leave the endpoints live but turn off all the navigation to the endpoint so we can send out the link as a "beta" test for specific customers). This does occasionally cause problems with feature branches lagging behind, but it's on the developer to ensure that their code merges into master smoothly (usually best done by syncing your feature branch back up to master frequently)