You seem to imply that working on a feature branch means you wait until you're finished the feature to try and merge your changes, which would be an absolutely

You seem to imply that working on a feature branch means you wait until you're finished the feature to try and merge your changes, which would be an absolutely insane workflow in any sizable org. While working on a feature branch, you should be pulling in the latest from origin/master on a pretty regular basis such that you never have a big merge. You should be merging early and merging often. The benefit here is that you get to work on functionality without hindering anyone else (by putting the codebase in a functioning, but transitional state), while getting to integrate on your own schedule. By the time it's ready to push to everyone else, there should be no merge. It'll be a fast-forward. Feature branches, with a policy of merge early and often, make life substantially easier than traditional continuous integration workflows. Having everybody checking in in-progress work to the same place is a nightmare. When I'm working on a feature, I want to be able to commit in small bite-sized chunks that allow me to explore solutions, rollback changes, rebase on-top of whatever I want, and ultimately squash my work into a single cleanly merged chunk of work. Any other workflow is limiting and restricting many of the benefits of git.