I think it really depends on what you’re developing and delivering. Master based development is great for end-user deliverables (web apps being the big one that comes to mind, many libraries could do this too). But if you’re writing a language or LTS releases I could see a pretty good case for a branching model like git-flow.

My experience with a work using gitflow is similar to yours, it was very messy and hard to manage. It was even worse that those driving it didn’t really know much about git so 95% of the commit messages were “Merged X into Y...” instead of using a more linear history.