We're back to things that only work for small changes. Large features that need days or weeks of work before they can be mainlined aren't a rare occurrence, they are the norm, and usually generate the most value for a product.

Not to mention, you often need to polish a release while developing large features for the next release - again cases where you need branches.

Of course, you can also try to take the feature flag model, and avoid refactoring entirely. Unlikely to be a good strategy for a long lived product.