[nostrademons]

Both Google and Facebook use trunk-based development. If Google can get away with a single trunk and 15,000 or so committers, chances are your organization can too.

The reason for trunk-based development over feature branches is that the time required to integrate a patch usually increases proportional to the square of the time since last integration. With trunk-based development, most commits reflect about 1-2 days worth of work, and they go in with minimal conflicts. Branches (and patches that sit idle for a month or two) often take forever to integrate, because as you are trying to update your code to the new master, the master is itself changing. At some point, the process doesn't converge, and you can spend forever trying to update a branch.