It can be fine, but the moment you need to roll back a change, you'll wish for feature branches. If you reach for cherry-pick, you've failed.
Anyway, branches and merge-requests take almost zero extra time and effort above pushing to master, with the added benefit that you can test and deploy a branch from your CI/CD separately.
Advancement at Google is tied heavily to being on the right projects to the extent that I think you're way overselling the extent to which the higher levels will be better at their jobs.