Mostly solo dev. I only use branches when working with some colleagues who are "branchists". It's not that I don't understand branches, but they always look unnecessarily cumbersome to me. The worst offenders are "feature branches"... I want my tests to try the program with/without the new feature and compare the results. Thus any feature is better implemented in the master branch, and activated using a flag. No need for a branch. If your feature is hidden in another branch, how can you test it? Does your test suite run git commands?
Do you push your code to a repository where you have some CI set up? Or is it just local? If it's the latter and you just run tests on the command line then yea maybe you don't need branches. On the other hand I find branches can be useful if I have a larger refactor going on and I'm not too sure what it's going to look like in the end. Then I can keep it on a branch and compare it to "last known stable commit," and if something else comes up that needs to be fixed right away I can put my larger refactor on hold and fix it, and come back to the larger refactor.
