Cargo Cult and Branch Names

I’ve seen (and worked on) projects which tell you to name branches with a chore or fix or feat prefix. Why is that?

If branches are short lived, I don’t get the point. Whatever goes after the prefix is the key part, which describes the branch. I don’t see whatfeat/login-with-fingerprint buys me vs login-with-fingerprint. In both cases I expect the commits (and pull requests, if used) to go deeper on the what and why.

Is it supposed to help you when you have long lived branches? It’s hard to understand that point. Again whatever describes the branch (login-with-fingerprintin previous my example) will end up being more useful when navigating the branches than the “category” . If you have few long lived branches, the category won’t really help. If you have tons of long lived branches, same thing!

Maybe some teams have just the right amount of active branches (not few but not a lot) that the “category” prefix help them navigate the current state of the repo? That’s fine.

Maybe then other teams/individuals just mindlessly copied the practice to other projects where it doesn’t help at all? That’s sad.

Or am I missing something? What’s the point of branch prefixes?