The difference is that, in our flow, the merge conflicts are on the scale of a a single developer making a single self-contained commit. In a flow with feature branches, the merge conflicts are on a scale of the entire branch conflicting with any other changes made on master.

But yes we also provide tools (https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chrome-infra-docs/f...) to make things like rebasing (see git rebase-update) your local branches on top of master easier.