[jasode]

>A valid point- if you're not careful that can happen. Key things: remove those ifs after a launch

I think a big factor that's unspoken about "trunk-based-master" development is that it fits better with "website apps" such as Facebook and Etsy. The "live website" can be thought of as a "single executable" and trunk-based mental model maps well to that. The feature-flags as a replacement for branches doesn't result in an unusable combinatorial explosion. There are minimal # of "alternate universes" of Facebook... maybe a "Facebook for internal engineers" etc. You can tame that with feature-flags.

However, for corporate development where the output is "exe" files... e.g. version 2.x of product has dependencies on a old version of a library and a version 3.x uses a totally different architecture with different conflicting dependencies... you can't model that code evolution in a clean manner with feature-flag "if" statements. If you move the "if" statements outside of the code and into preprocessors (#ifdef) or the "build" system such as cmake, you've just shifted the problem around instead of solving it. Branches instead of feature-flags are cleaner and more sane for certain domains.

[mabbo]

Fortunately, exe development is becoming a small subset of software these days.