Ironically, for that reason, GitFlow would work better in Mercurial. Go figure.

HgFlow already exists and is actively developed: https://bitbucket.org/yujiewu/hgflow/wiki/Home. It even goes above and beyond GitFlow and adds generalized streams and sub-streams. I've never had to use those extra features, but the core model works well.

Mercurial branches are not meant to be used for short-lived feature branches, though. As "hg branch" puts it: "branches are permanent and global, did you want a bookmark?".

You can close a branch and it will not show up as being active but you still have the info for every commit which is what makes history readable.