> do you just merge updated remote branches into your stale local branches?

Every single developer I work with (or have in the last 8 years) does this. "Messes up the history" ? The merge commit describes that there are uptaken changes from the "main" branch. It doesn't seem to be a problem in practice.

I've been doing that for years, and it's never messed up the history.

We don't merge one-off branches into other one-off branches unless they're all under the same feature. Everything goes via develop when they're complete, and new one-off branches are created from develop.

When we release to production, develop gets merged to master.

We consider a 'feature' a large piece of work that will take several weeks, during which time several releases to production may be done for other work/tickets.