There's an easy way around this, and that's to namespace in some way branches that are free to be overwritten, ie WIP work not yet merged into the canonical bra

There's an easy way around this, and that's to namespace in some way branches that are free to be overwritten, ie WIP work not yet merged into the canonical branches. Works just fine. If the project is too large for this, you can also fork off the repo itself and then merge in your changes to the main canonical version when you're ready.