I don't know why continuous integration is being put on such a pedestal. I would agree that as soon as features are done they should be committed, but there are

I don't know why continuous integration is being put on such a pedestal. I would agree that as soon as features are done they should be committed, but there are two common cases that occur in my experience doing web development that don't fit with this approach. First, there are plenty of features and especially refactors that reasonably require a few days of work in order to be complete. How is committing half-finished or partially executed features in the build is useful? Second, there is the case where you are juggling development of multiple features at the same time. It is clearly better to have these in their own branches so they can be worked on independently of each other rather than working with a tangle of unrelated and unfinished changes.