‘A branch is just a ref with some sane defaults’ is saying a strictly different thing than ‘a branch is just a ref’. Yes, you can do anything you can do to a b

‘A branch is just a ref with some sane defaults’ is saying a strictly different thing than ‘a branch is just a ref’. Yes, you can do anything you can do to a branch tag to any other tag (or directly to any commit hash). Which means you can do things like ‘merge’ any of those things. Not just refs. So things that are not refs can act like branches. And you can’t just treat any ref as a branch. Is a remote a branch? No - so things that are refs can also not act like branches. X is Y can’t be true if there are instances of X that are not Y and instances of Y that are not X.