We don't have release branches, the commit is just tagged as being currently deployed in production.
People merge their feature branches to master during working hours (by merging CI validated PRs) and release when they get a chance. Normally do about 10-20 releases per day.
For those of us that develop products that are sold to customers (and run on-premise), you will end up with customers on various releases. It is imperative that we can fix bugs in a release without requiring the customers to upgrade versions (major.minor).