[sangnoir]

> It's very easy for branches to get abused and merging long-standing branches in with the master branch is always expensive task that's bound to have scary issues.

You only get scary merge issues if you do not frequently pull in changes from your upstream branch! Daily works for me, and not once have I been let down when squash-merging back - even for large, multiweek changes. I'm always surprised to hear this is not common practice on HN.