Awkward Software Developments

I recently been moved to a new team with a new software architect/lead. We are starting this brand new project and the software lead insists that since we are a relatively small team (devs < 5) we are going to have one branch per sprint (of course there's still going to be dev, qa, master). All the devs are going to pull this branch locally and directly code on it and push everything back to the remote sprint branch at least twice a day. When I heard this...it was driving me nuts. All my previous teams were using some form of git flow software development and all of sudden this software lead shows up and starts saying that his way is better. So just want to ask: is this another kind of software development standard in other companies? Does your team do this? Think of all the merge conflicts we would have to resolve each day (the software leads says that if there's a lot of merge conflicts that means you guys aren't communicating correctly.)