I agree. On balance I feel like beta confuses people more than it fulfills a utility.
I think it helps to draw a distinction there between things that you use and have meaning internally and things that mean something to third parties. The beta branch is a good example of this. While it may have some internal utility, it has little utility for third parties and sometimes confuses them.
I’d be interested to hear otherwise, but thinking about it now, I can’t recall a serious self-hoster that actually uses beta in any meaningful way. “Basic Bob” doesn’t really know what a branch is and probably doesn’t care (and fair enough). “Advanced Ally” is going to use tests-passed if she’s an individual or SMB, and may use stable (or pin commits) if she’s a medium-sized or large enterprise.
My suggestion would be to keep everything branch-wise exactly as it is but just say publicly “We have two branches you can use: tests-passed (the default and best) and stable (if you know what you’re doing and have a particular need).”