What Goes Wrong When You Switch Branching Strategies Mid-Flight

I have been part of at least four branching strategy migrations over a 12-year career. GitFlow to trunk-based. Bitbucket to GitHub. Sprint branches to release branches and back again. Every time, the decision to switch made sense on paper. Every time, the real problems showed up later, usually during the first production hotfix. Trunk-based development is the right long-term model for most teams. I am not arguing against it. But I have seen enough transitions go sideways that I wanted to write down what I have noticed, in case it is useful to someone going through the same thing. The switch usually happens fast In most places I have worked, the decision to change branching strategies came from leadership during a broader initiative. A platform migration, a new CI/CD tool, a push to modernize. The intent is always good. But the rollout tends to be uniform. Every repo switches at once, regardless of whether each team is ready for the new workflow. The thing is, a branching strategy is no