Tags are immutable. Branches are mutable. You can add to them and refactor patch series that are on them, equally valid in the eyes of git. For example a dev

Tags are immutable. Branches are mutable. You can add to them and refactor patch series that are on them, equally valid in the eyes of git. For example a development branch has no implied "promise" about stability of its history, it is much better to not only refactor the code but also refactor the history so sub-patches are squashed into the single feature patch that they logically belong to, and not spawn lives of their own. There is no reason to run that kind of development branch like a stable "branch of record".