Is branch development recommended in Pega Customer Decision Hub?

As we understand the design time configuration ruleset is set to CDH-Artifacts:01-01-01, so does this imply we can never have higher versions for this RS and it acts like a Production Ruleset wherein this RS must be kept unlocked in all environments ?

Currently we are able to point the design time configuration in Access group to a branch RS. However we are failing at achieving the branching purpose because incase we merged the branch changes to 01-01-02 of CDH-Artifacts, then the Next Best Action Designer Portal will not work as it tries to match the version which contains the Next Best Action Designer Model rule to the version configured in Access Group and for  branch we cannot change it to 01-01-02.