Yes, this doesn't get talked about enough, however, I understand how discussion can get polarising: Some downsides of feature branches can be mitigated. Make CI

Yes, this doesn't get talked about enough, however, I understand how discussion can get polarising: Some downsides of feature branches can be mitigated. Make CI do a merge before running tests, failing the test if there are conflicts. If you split your teams well, you may not need to ship work in big long running branches. Some of it also comes down to discipline. Objectively the continuous integration model wins in my opinion, but the feature branch thing we've ended up with seems to work well in many general cases. I think as with many programming related phenomena it seems to largely depends on human factors.