Branches were made by copying the directory tree, and svn doesn't have local commits so it always went straight to the server.

I think svn also originally didn't have merging, or at the very least it was such a bad experience svnmerge.py was created and really common to use. Even once it got good it was mostly the equivalent of using git cherry-pick to pull commits across branches, though it did get a special "reintegrate" mode for diffing a branch and applying that back to trunk (and I remember there being something about it being possible to accidentally undo commits if you weren't fully up to date when running it...?)