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How would you describe the difference between branches and forks? Functionally I can create a new branch, do my changes, get tests passing and PR from there, or I can fork master, do my changes, get tests passing and PR.

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Yes technically this is a branch, but like a frictionless branch. You don't have to name a branch for instance. You don't have to worry about branch deletion, even though now this is all automated.

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches...

A fork is still a lot less friction. Otherwise, technically yes it is a branch.

Ah right, generally I quite like having branch names because I can name the brach aligned to the jira ticket that it's associated with, I'm not a big fan of jira, but atleast it documents the feature request etc. And also you can track multiple different features in flight at once (I know it's not ideal, but sometimes you're doing several different things that need to be merged in order etc)

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