[QuercusMax]

I've done branchy development to good effect for user-installable software, where we committed to maintain e.g. 3.2.x for a certain time period, so we had to keep release branches around for a long while.

But for continuously deployed SaaS or webapps, there's no point.

[plorkyeran]

I've worked on software where we had multiple maintained release branches and we always just worked off master and then cut long-lived release branches from master at some point. Once a branch was cut we'd never merge master into it again and instead backport just specific fixes, which is quite different from git-flow.

[dcrazy]

Until you have a customer that must stay on v.previous for extra time for some reason.

[QuercusMax]

Well in that case it sounds like you're shipping multiple versioned instances of your software for different clients, which is much closer to shrink-wrapped software than it is to e.g. gmail.