When working with a team, everybody should be working on as close to the same codebase as possible, to prevent difficult merges later on.

I agree with this, but disagree that avoiding branching is a good way to do it. In my experience, the solution is more, smaller, feature-specific branches that get merged back to master quickly (within a couple of days if possible). If you need to maintain a long-running feature branch, it should frequently be rebased on top of master so that at any given point the likelihood of major conflicts is reduced.