My guess is that trunk based development is the idea that all commits pushed to the canonical repository are pushed to trunk (rather than a remote branch) with incomplete code being hidden using feature toggles?
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding things, but the impression I got from the original post is that most (many? all?) developers have local repositories where they manage their features. So, instead of using branches in the central repository, those branches are employed in local repos.
The article contrasts Google's & Facebook's model with the pull-request model of Etsy and Github but again I don't really see much of a difference. Facebook sends a patch to phabricator for review, someone looks over it and then it gets committed to trunk.
I agree. I suspect it may be just workflow/jargon differences?