It depends on the project being worked on. If the main branch changes often enough that you need to merge master before you merge the branch you’ll spend a lot

It depends on the project being worked on. If the main branch changes often enough that you need to merge master before you merge the branch you’ll spend a lot of time propagating changes. And then there’s the problem of large codebases. Without a really good cache strategy for builds all of the branch switching and merging will cause a lot of rebuilds. For some languages and large projects that can be 20+ minutes for a fresh build on each switch. That’s enough time to get distracted by emails or hacker news. I’m a big fan of small commits, often and breaking down changes but it does require a large amount of automation and tooling to support well.