It's not confusing, maybe it's not suited for your particular case, as any other tool. There's no magic tool/process/etc that does it all for everybody.
GitFlow has been working great for us. A team of 15 developers, working with feature branches, we have our CircleCI configured to automatically deploy the "develop" branch to our "QA environment", and our "master" branch to "production" environment.
The "hotfix" and "release" are proven to be useful to us too; we just need to have effective communication with our team, so everybody rebase their feature branch after a merge in our main branches.
GitFlow has been working great for us. A team of 15 developers, working with feature branches, we have our CircleCI configured to automatically deploy the "develop" branch to our "QA environment", and our "master" branch to "production" environment.
The "hotfix" and "release" are proven to be useful to us too; we just need to have effective communication with our team, so everybody rebase their feature branch after a merge in our main branches.