One of the difficult things with git is it's hard to know which level of abstraction people are talking about. As I was typing my first comment I thought "well

One of the difficult things with git is it's hard to know which level of abstraction people are talking about. As I was typing my first comment I thought "well I guess a detached HEAD state is a branch too, as a branch is just a chain of commits". But that's at a completely different level of abstraction to where the OP is at. I would be at the "git as just a big ol' DAG" level but the OP is at the "git as a version control system" level.