Stacking branches for any extended period of time is definitely a poor mixing of the concepts of branches and commits. If you have a set of changes you need to keep in order, but you also need to maintain multiple silos where you can cleanly allow the code to diverge, that divergence constitutes the failure of your efforts to keep the changes in order.

Until you can make it effortless, maintaining a substantial commit structure and constantly rebasing to add changes to the proper commit quickly turns into more effort than just waiting to the end and manually editing a monster diff into multiple sensible commits. But we take the challenge and tell ourselves we can do better if we're proactive.