I'm a fan of "Master is production" , so as soon as a commit is merged into Master it's deployed immediately. That way everyone always has access to what exactly is in production and helps enforce the mindset that anything merged into Master needs to be 100% ready to go.
Master should be the known-good version. Not the version you're deploying right now, but the version you deployed yesterday from a release branch and nobody screamed. That makes it much less likely that your teammates will rebase onto a bad commit that needs to be rolled back in prod.
