My mental model is that cherry-picks are like a copy by-value of one or more patches. A merge is a copy by-reference of a specific series of patches.

It just so happens that what I usually want in practice is to make copies by-value. There are other integration workflows that make copies by-reference with dedicated merge commits. But my team's most common use case for long-lived branches is to track bugfixes for deployment to remote hardware separately from mainline development. So, by-value copies of small changes is much more common.