◇ Could this help me?
Yes. Main as production, short-lived feature branches, and review before merge is the model most teams should run, and the advice to defer heavier branching models until release complexity actually justifies them is the part people usually get wrong in the other direction. Adopt it alongside branch protection on main, since the rule only holds if the tooling enforces it. This is a general practice.
Review how branches are used in this repository and tell me whether work reaches the main branch through review or directly. Then set up a simple strategy: main as production, short-lived feature branches, and a pull request before any merge. Recommend the branch protection settings that would enforce it, including required review and required status checks, and tell me what signal should indicate that this project has outgrown this simple model.