Usually, feature branches mean that all the work to implement a particular feature is done on that branch. That could be weeks of work from several developers. The code isn’t merged until the feature is complete. It’s more common in the industry compared to trunk-based development.

My previous employer had:

• Feature branches for each new feature.
• A dev branch, where new features were merged once they were done.
• A beta branch, branched from dev once per week.
• A live/prod branch, branched from beta four times per year.

This structure is very common in enterprise apps. Customers that need stability (don’t want things to change a lot, for example if they have their own training material for their staff) use the live branch, while customers that want the newest features use the beta branch.

Bug fixes were annoying since you’d have to first do them in the live branch then port them to the beta and dev branches (or vice versa).