In my experience, branches generally lead to people feeling like they have free reign and introducing a slew of issues (reduced code quality, difficulties in merging, broken builds, etc)
In an organized enough team with a large enough project, tasks should be able to be carried through concurrently on a single branch for the most part.
You only get scary merge issues if you do not frequently pull in changes from your upstream branch! Daily works for me, and not once have I been let down when squash-merging back - even for large, multiweek changes. I'm always surprised to hear this is not common practice on HN.
Branching is very useful, but you need to continuously merge, so you find conflicts as soon as they arise.