My experience was that older VCS's (SVN in my case) leaned in heavily to the trunk based paradigm. I don't know what you're talking about with prod branches. The default branch in SVN was called - trunk.
I think that's what they're saying. People think that when they switch to git they have to use prod and other, newer workflows. But you can keep doing the same thing you did in SVN, using trunk primarily in git, with easier merges.
