>once the review is done, it should be fine to merge at any point, today or tomorrow
Sometimes there are considerations like QA/infrastructure resourcing that dictate when something can go into master. Ideally that's rare but I have worked in a place where it's a consideration for every single merge.
To expand on this a little: we had a simple branching model. To/from master for work, branch from master to cut a release. Being highly regulated, as a matter of (unchangeable) policy, every change needed testing by QA team. QA team == QA guy. Among feature work without hard release dates, there was also bug fixes with some urgency, and regulatory work with hard release dates. Given we traded flexibility in our branching model for simplicity, we instead had to consider if something could be merged to master without impacting QA load of anything already merged but not released. It worked fine for us but were were a team of <5. My remark about trading flexibility is really the crux of it all though. There's compromises that need to made and this one made sense for us at the time.
Sometimes there are considerations like QA/infrastructure resourcing that dictate when something can go into master. Ideally that's rare but I have worked in a place where it's a consideration for every single merge.
To expand on this a little: we had a simple branching model. To/from master for work, branch from master to cut a release. Being highly regulated, as a matter of (unchangeable) policy, every change needed testing by QA team. QA team == QA guy. Among feature work without hard release dates, there was also bug fixes with some urgency, and regulatory work with hard release dates. Given we traded flexibility in our branching model for simplicity, we instead had to consider if something could be merged to master without impacting QA load of anything already merged but not released. It worked fine for us but were were a team of <5. My remark about trading flexibility is really the crux of it all though. There's compromises that need to made and this one made sense for us at the time.