I find it really annoying when someone insists that the develop branch is for production and not... development...

Wooot

Wait, what?

I believe it depends on what your team is doing.

I've worked with people that did everything on other branches and then merged into development, where everything was tested before being sent to master.
And worked with people who worked using the development branch (all at the same time) for everything, then merging into master.

But yeah, can be a bit messy sometimes. You just have to sit with the team and understand in detail how things are done there.
Good luck with that, btw.

Well, I worked with a team which has staging as production, development as staging and 'development_local' as development.

There are definitely valid situations for the develop branch to have a different role than development; the problem is that there is not consistent git flow from project to project with this person.