Not the original commenter but this felt worth adding to: you mention 'cargo culting', yet there are already two comments raising the core benefit, which is keeping main 'stable and working' while develop stays 'rough and ready'.

A less rigid development branch allows feature branches to be smaller and easier to merge, and keeps developers working against more recent code.

A more locked-down, PR-only main branch enables proper testing before merging, and ensures that the feature and release branches stemming from it start in a cleaner state.

I've worked with both approaches and I'm firmly in the camp of keeping main stable, with a looser shared branch for the team to iterate on.