Gitflow, and its various flavours, has been a popular alternative. Though it seems trunk-based is considered the preferred standard due to emphasis on achieving a stable main branch, simplified pipelines and faster cycle times. This requires a bit more maturity to get right if I'm not mistaken as you need good automation, test coverage and code review practices.
I've never heard of Gitflow or anything. I've been doing this stuff for almost a decade and trunk based with short lived development branches is all I've ever seen.
It's good that people experiment with new ideas I guess, but in my 27 years as a software developer all the progress I've seen is towards continuous integration and testing. The more branches and configurations there are, the slower development is and the lower overall quality is. Sometimes there are advantages to counterbalance that, and if you've got a huge team and a huge user base it may be worth the cost. But a strong default bias towards less branches, less options, test more often, merge sooner, deploy sooner has always worked better than fancy alternatives.
Yeah, it was pretty popular for a while but I doubt many people really do it because of it’s shortcomings. I guess if you spent most of your time in feature freezes trying to stabilise the upcoming release of your product, but I’ve often felt it’s better to either just have a few feature branches queued ready to merge once the master branch is tagged and released, or to branch master into a release branch once you have a feature freeze and only commit bug fixes to that. But then you have the annoyance of having to cherry-pick features between the branches.
Alternative is having long lived “devel” branches or even dedicated release branches. Used to be quite popular especially with waterfall style processes
