It can be beneficial if there is no mechanism that ensures that develop is always in a working state, but there is one that ensures that master is. The immediate benefit is that a new feature branch can always be started off master from a known-good state.

Of course, there are ways to enforce a known-good state on master without a dedicated develop branch, but it can be easier when having the two branches.

(I just dislike the name “develop”, because branch names should be nouns.)

Prod deployments usually have a tag associated