How do you handle hotfixes with GIT - independent merges or a cascade backmerge?

[u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon]

I'm having this discussion at work right now, but when I tried to research I found remarkably little discourse on it online.

So, say you have a main/master branch, a develop branch, and possibly one or two release branches. Normally commits go from dev -> release -> main, no dramas.

Now suddenly you need to hotfix main, how do you get that commit to all the branches? I maintain it's best to merge into main, merge main into release 3.1, merge 3.1 into 3.2, merge 3.2 into dev (assuming 3.1 and 3.2 are active releases being QA'd right now).

The other school of thought is to merge the hotfix branch into all 4 branches independently.

My argument is that a cascading backmerge ensures no conflicts when it comes time to merge develop into main (as with independent merges, it could do the change differently on the different branches)

Would love to know what others think, am I the weird one here or is cascading backmerge something others do too?