Having develop and main seems like more of a pain than PRs to main and using release branches. This model is also very limiting if you need to support multiple releases in parallel. Maybe this does not apply to your team.
We really only have staging/production so it works great for us, we don't have to support multiple releases at the same time. I agree it gets more difficult if that is a concern.
I don’t see what it gains you even with that limit, though. You’re essentially using your main branch just to hold tags. If you rename “develop” to “main”, your big merges to main go away entirely and turn into zero effort branching.
One of my biggest concerns about long lived branches is that they drift. Tiny merge issues end up accumulating over time, or people forget to merge back a hotfixes, and you can end up with your dev branch behaving slightly different from your release branch. This model can work but it is more complex and more brittle in a world of cheap branching.
I have gone through the big move from long lived branches to “trunk based development” twice in two very large code bases. In both cases the move showed us many places the codebase had unintentionally diverged over the years because we had to reconcile all of it to establish the new “main”.
