[globular-toast]

That's not git flow, that's just release/maintenance branches.

The main feature of git flow is having multiple redundant branches for no reason. Namely a separate develop and master. There is no point of that at all. Look at the diagram, move all tags from master to develop, delete master and rename develop to master. There, you now have the workflow you've described without redundant branches.

[barumi]

> The main feature of git flow is having multiple redundant branches for no reason. Namely a separate develop and master.

This statement is simply wrong and ignorant.

The reason why mainline and develop branches exist is due to the fact that production-ready code and unstable code are not the same ops-wise.

Nowadays, with the dissemination of CICD practices, that difference has been shifted away from the source code repository and into the Delivery/Deployment phase of a CICD pipeline. Yet, the overall principle is the same, and arguably its still here. Calling those differences "redundant and for no reason" is just ignorant at multiple levels, from software engineering to the fact that the sofware lifecycle process for commercial software projects, the kind that had to "go gold", had very specific requirements.

[globular-toast]

You don't have to look hard at the git flow diagram to see the redundancy. It's plain as day. Of course I'm talking about today. Why would I be talking about 20 years ago? We have continuous integration and automated build pipelines so there's no reason to have your build artifacts living in the git repository. git is for source code. There are other solutions better suited to storing artifacts.