Hey @Jay_Walters - thanks for reaching out.
Generally speaking, the first strategy you've described here is considered the most hygienic, in the sense that it maintains a certain level of granularity and separation. Merge conflicts are, to an extent, the natural byproduct of branch-based development but we do have some recommendations for minimizing them.
I also answered a somewhat similar question over here, which might give you some insight into best practices. The big benefit of this particular pattern is that you shouldn't ever have conflicts after approving a PR, only when rebasing in-progress feature branches.