Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)
> Trunk-based development. ... is beneficial in part because it avoids the painful merges that often occur when it is time to reconcile long-lived branches. Development on branches is unusual and not well supported at Google, though branches are typically used for releases.<p>This sounds like the SVN model to me where branches are cumbersome and therefore they are very rare.  After getting used to the Git branching model where branches are free and merges are painless, it would be very hard to go back to the old development model without branches.