[xorcist]

This is a perfect use for tags. They allocate no extra storage space, and act as "savepoints" which you can refer to at any time. (Branches move, tags stay put.) They also guarantee that those loose ends are not garbage collected. Sometimes I delete a bunch of old ones, but any codebase of mine will at any time have a handful of old and probably useless tags. But that's ok.

[brown9-2]

tags and branches are both just refs to the commit and can be used interchangeably for something like this. tags are not immutable, just in convention.

[conceptme]

Annotated tags have their own commit I believe that is ehy you should use annotated tags for release tags.