These days, the standard practice is probably to use bookmarks, which are more or less like Git branches.

No. You have the choice to use either named branches or bookmarks, and which one you choose is a matter of your workflow. Note that even a Git-like workflow does not necessarily require the use of bookmarks.

Mercurial is still designed under the assumption that people will use named branches and the Git-like aspects of bookmarks exist to ease transition from Git: http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2014-January/0464...

Personally, I use Fossil-like private branches [1] in order to facilitate local work that I may still want to reorganize before pushing it to a shared server; I use bookmarks solely for local tags.

[1] Emulated by putting a named branch in the secret phase. I actually have a simple extension to automatically make all branches that start with a dot (e.g, ".tempstuff") secret.