I think from the perspective of the central repository, this is a sane approach. Locally though, you should still be routinely using (short-lived) feature branches. Working directly off master on your local machine can make things annoying / complicated when you need to move away from your work for a moment (say to fix a bug) and don't have a good representation of "what's currently on production".

Also, I think this approach necessitates that you have some form of continuous deployment, or strong assurances that master is almost always on production. If, for example, you have a fixed 2-week cycle for production releases, "just work off master" will be a source of pain when you inevitably have to fix a bug on production without rolling out the other commits that are there for the "next release". That might not be an optimal way of developing, but it's about more than just how you use git - it's really more of a delivery question.