Most projects have the same set of default branches (trunk, dev, release, prerelease) which should be automatically protected against deletion, trunk and dev should require pull request approvals and status checks, etc...

Creating a default config file with these rules and deploying that across specified repositories would make it simple to manage these rules in bulk.

This action could be leveraged to handle this from this repo: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/set-branch-protection