My problem with trunk based development is I feel like people treat it as the solution to a problem that is fundamentally a developer culture problem.

You need to commit small changes, frequently, which requires you to only change small sections of the code and make incremental changes, something which can be a difficult habit to get used to.

This is really the main benefit of trunk based development, and it’s something you can get with feature branches as well, you just have to make sure everyone on your team starts reducing scope of their features and merging in smaller and smaller features sets.

There’s nothing inherit in the trunk based development model that stops someone from sitting on changes for a month, never pulling, and then trying to pull and ending up with a bunch of conflicts anyways. So it really feels like “yeah use trunk based development” boils down to “integrate continuously” which can be done with a branching model.