Not to answer your questions directly, but Paul Hammant has written a bunch about this over the years:

http://paulhammant.com/2013/04/05/what-is-trunk-based-develo...

http://paulhammant.com/2013/05/06/googles-scaled-trunk-based...

http://paulhammant.com/2014/04/03/microsofts-trunk-based-dev...

http://paulhammant.com/2014/01/06/googlers-subset-their-trun...

https://dzone.com/articles/legacy-app-rejuvenation

I just read the first link (adding the others to my reading backlog), based on it it seems like trunk based development is less of a development model and more of a release model. Especially it does not seem to conflict directly with feature branch model.

Perhaps partly. But Paul also mentions "Developers do not break the build with any commit" -- that places a pretty heavy constraint upon regular development outside of releases.

See also the so-called "not rocket science rule of software engineering": https://graydon.livejournal.com/186550.html

See also got-dmz or atlassian bamboo's gatekeeper feature. Team city has something similar too. Surprised the guy who wrote bors hadn't seen more examples, I have seen the idea come up over and over again (and strongly support it).

Sorry for the typo, I meant Git-DMZ. Damned auto-incorrect.