You are right, that would be the opposite extreme. What we do is that we create a branch and push our code every few hours. After a preset time, the branch is merged with the level 2 branch for code review/testing/regression etc., and after that to the main branch and then released to live production.
My experience has been that maximizing merges works best. If you're constantly merging, hardly any of your merges have any friction. The longer you're separate from the master branch, the more likely you are to get painful merges with conflicts and subtle bugs.
This saves us some merging.