I would think it is less on the "don't have branches" but more "try to have a happy/common path." This is oddly at odds with how humans work as operators. For human operators, you typically want each interaction to be as unpredictable as possible, to keep their attention. Falling into rote action is a sure way to get a mistake out of a person. (Or to get them to quit.)

However, for computers, it is good to view them as a machine. As most machines, they are best if they are doing the exact same thing over and over. And over.

As such, if you can contrive for the machine to always take the same branch the vast majority of the time, you will get it to work faster. Whether this is done with a dynamic arrangement of the data, or a static arrangement of the code depends largely on the specifics. Consider sorting networks as a fun exploration of the idea. They can be ridiculously fast, as they always do the same amount of work. (Provided you have enough execution units.)