How would you handle branching and merging of state files? Is there a valid reason to have different state files on different branches (our use case: different

How would you handle branching and merging of state files? Is there a valid reason to have different state files on different branches (our use case: different branches represent different DTAP phases, and hence deploy to different environments)? What would merge conflict resolution look like for these state files? What would happen if I deploy an environment from one branch that had previously been deployed from a different branch? If the answer is "you should never branch and merge state files", then the corollary is "you should never put state files in source control".