I twice worked in a teams where we did not use branches (or PRs). Both were working like that when I joined them.

The first was because we were svn (and maybe even csv before that, but I cannot remember) and that did not support branching easily. That team did switch to git, which did not go with its some struggles, and misconceptions, such as: "Never use rebase."

The second team was already working without branches and releasing a new version of the tool (the Bond3D Slicer for 3D printing) every night. It worked very well. Often we were able to implement and release new features within two or three days allowing the users to continue with their experiments.

When after some years the organization implemented more 'quality assurance' they demanded that we would make monthly releases that were formally tested by the users, we created branches for each release. The idea was that some of the users would test the releases before they were official released, but that testing would often take more than a month, one time even three months, because they were 'too busy' to do the formal review. But at the same time some users were using the daily builds because these builds had the features implemented that they needed. As a result of this, the quality did not improve and a lot of time was wasted, although the formal quality assurance, dictated by some ISO standard, was assured.

I have no experience with moving away from using branches. It might be a good idea to point your manager/team lead/scrum master to dora.dev or the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT