The trick with long lived branches is to merge upstream changes frequently so you don't fall behind and keep your branch in a mergeable state. Git was designed for code bases much larger than what most people deal with where long lived branches are just a reality.
Like the Linux kernel for example. You don't get to push half finished work with projects like that. Actually, you don't get to push at all. There is only pull. Some branches exist for many months or even years and there could be entire teams collaborating on them. The one absolute certainty you have on such branches is that there is an absolutely insane amount of upstream changes all the time. The only way to stay on top of that is to merge those changes often.
You can think of the Linux kernel git as a decentralized network of stacked branches that have a few central people pulling changes from branches they have reviewed into their own branches with the one that Linus Torvalds maintains as the ultimate branch on which releases get tagged. The vast majority of changes land to his branch via multiple layers of other people, each with their own branches and each adding their own reviews. Effectively all changes Linus Torvalds integrates are stacked. And he doesn't integrate them unless they are stacked properly with nice clean histories.
You could say, git was explicitly designed to do stacked branches at scale. So, it's kind of ironic that people are re-discovering this as a thing. It always was intended to be used like this. It's been used like that since the very beginning.
Like the Linux kernel for example. You don't get to push half finished work with projects like that. Actually, you don't get to push at all. There is only pull. Some branches exist for many months or even years and there could be entire teams collaborating on them. The one absolute certainty you have on such branches is that there is an absolutely insane amount of upstream changes all the time. The only way to stay on top of that is to merge those changes often.
You can think of the Linux kernel git as a decentralized network of stacked branches that have a few central people pulling changes from branches they have reviewed into their own branches with the one that Linus Torvalds maintains as the ultimate branch on which releases get tagged. The vast majority of changes land to his branch via multiple layers of other people, each with their own branches and each adding their own reviews. Effectively all changes Linus Torvalds integrates are stacked. And he doesn't integrate them unless they are stacked properly with nice clean histories.
You could say, git was explicitly designed to do stacked branches at scale. So, it's kind of ironic that people are re-discovering this as a thing. It always was intended to be used like this. It's been used like that since the very beginning.