I have wondered the same too for a long time. But I have never seen the branching commit mentioned. Instead, most of the contributor documentation just ask you

I have wondered the same too for a long time. But I have never seen the branching commit mentioned. Instead, most of the contributor documentation just ask you to rebase your feature branch on the latest master (or whatever it is called now) and send in those patches. I believe that patchset application is treated the same way as rebasing. It should be possible to apply patches to the master without conflicts as long as the two branches haven't diverged too much. In case the branches did diverge a lot, the contributor is expected to sort it out by the rebase mentioned above. Patch workflow forces you to think about diff introduced by each commit, instead of worrying only about conflicts between two branches when merging. Ultimately, it requires care and discipline from contributor and maintainer that is not strictly necessary with fork-PR workflow. However, commit quality would improve a lot if the same discipline was followed everywhere.