Is it really true that Google has no feature branches? Sounds unlikely to me. How do you do code reviews for example if everything goes straight to main?
I’m not sure why TBD should have anything to do with code reviews. You aren’t able to submit to main without first uploading a change or stack of changes to code reviews, then you submit the changes after they are approved. That has absolutely nothing to do with your branching model. Just think of it as a rebase request instead of a pull request. PR was always the wrong terminology anyway.
I kinda feel like your terminology is mixed up... You start off describing branches, but then say "pull" request and that it was the wrong terminology?
A pull request is requesting a pull from a separate forked repo.
A merge request is requesting a merge from a branch within the same repo.
And:
> You aren’t able to submit to main without first uploading a change or stack of changes to code reviews, then you submit the changes after they are approved.
How is this functionally different from a merge request? It seems like manually doing the exact same thing.
Well… On a conceptual level I’d call that a feature branch.