wrt that article, we don't run into these issues i think largely because we do something that seems straightforward to me that is for some reason not addressed

wrt that article, we don't run into these issues i think largely because we do something that seems straightforward to me that is for some reason not addressed in that article (unless i'm reading it wrong) which is to reintegrate (merge) from master into your feature branch rather often. the article you mention seems to think that you can either have short lived feature branches or integrate them into master all the time, where we (and most people, i think) do the opposite - integrate master into the feature branches so they're never that far behind and then do the opposite to fast forward the feature branch into master when it's ready to deploy. and yes, your mental model is off a bit - a branch in git is more like a bookmark in hg - multiple heads for a branch doesn't really make sense - every head is a branch, there is no such thing as an unnamed head.