break is goto the end of the loop, continue is goto the beginning of the loop, the closing of a loop block is goto the beginning of loop, else is goto the end of the conditional, if is maybe goto the next else, and return (early or not) is pop from the stack and goto that address.
The fact that a language feature uses a JUMP instruction does not make it necessarily evil; most of them do. Everything has both benefits and drawbacks which are often highly situational.
You may find it easier to convince people of the problem with early returns if you limit the scope of the argument to a more specific context than “always”: it’s usually easier to make an argument for a concrete case rather than an abstraction, and then show how the same reasoning applies to a large class of situations.
So are a lot of other constructs:
break is goto the end of the loop, continue is goto the beginning of the loop, the closing of a loop block is goto the beginning of loop, else is goto the end of the conditional, if is maybe goto the next else, and return (early or not) is pop from the stack and goto that address.
The fact that a language feature uses a JUMP instruction does not make it necessarily evil; most of them do. Everything has both benefits and drawbacks which are often highly situational.
You may find it easier to convince people of the problem with early returns if you limit the scope of the argument to a more specific context than “always”: it’s usually easier to make an argument for a concrete case rather than an abstraction, and then show how the same reasoning applies to a large class of situations.