That's true but using branches is not always a good idea specially if you want to collaborate in big projects and have strong communication with your team.
Master can be used as a chat room (substitute english with code) and leave branches for very specific cases when that doesn't work. That's basically doing continuous integration. If you prefer, you can think of it as if you are still having branches with one commit each ;).
The important thing for CI is being sure that each commit is either hidden (through a feature toggle maybe?) or it doesn't break anything.