This is true for our small team. The way our changes happen, we rarely get git conflicts, let alone really ugly ones. We have many repos and few team members (basically your example of 6). Even if two or three are working in the same repo (we have one repo that’s bigger than most), there’s enough distinct areas that our changes rarely touch.
In the past I’ve felt a little strange that we don’t “modernize” to adopt TBD, but over doing this for many years with the same size team, it just seems unnecessary because we’re a small team.
Is even easier with a small team to do TBD. Because the amount of integration is reduced the possible need of branches (or their TBD equivalents dark launch/branch by abstraction/feature flags) is greatly reduced. So the branches add ceremony where none is needed.
Though those branches could be needed if you are doing mobile, desktop or library/framework development.
In the past I’ve felt a little strange that we don’t “modernize” to adopt TBD, but over doing this for many years with the same size team, it just seems unnecessary because we’re a small team.