Waiting for code reviews from the lead dev. Often it ends with a branch sitting untouched for weeks and becomes a pain of merge conflicts.

Which VCS are you using? Couldn't you commit into the feature branch and then just switch back to the main branch as needed?

EDIT: I just realized I may have misunderstood the issue about merge conflicts, ignore me if I make no sense above

It's more about several weeks of changes to the main branch before the feature branch gets merged in. A lot of things can happen in several weeks. When working on it it's often rebased so minor conflicts are easy to sort out, but when it's done there's always something else to do. So you work on some other code for weeks, then at review time you have to sort through a bunch of conflicts in code you haven't worked on for weeks.

I feel you bro