I know, right??
It used to be like that, the published branch was read-only and safely out of reach.
Then they changed it, and not only did they remove the ability to make it read-only, they now actually want you to modify it directly.
There are some good workflows out there for both solo developers and teams, but they’re far from intuitive, they require setup, attention, and a bit of reading. The old way didn’t need any of that. It just worked. I’d love to go back to a world where things are intuitive and require no setup, no learning curve, no “workflow guides.” That should be the default.
Even the two workflows @love mentioned are likely used by a tiny percentage of users who happen to be on GitHub. Why should I have to change my way of working just because someone halfway across the world wants to sync with GitHub, when the old behavior was so simple, safe, and setup-free?
Here are a few of my rants from when I found out about it: Make it difficult (or impossible) to mess up the master branch