[Schwolop]

I learnt this one early on and definitely still encourage it (but aware of your caveat too). But I describe it differently when I'm coaching, and I think I've used the phrase "try to get your conditionals out of the way early".

My rationale is that having done this, I'm left with a smaller combinatoric mental space to work within. Like "if the program counter has reached this point then I know for a fact that X, Y, and Z don't apply - the function would have exited early if they did". And that then means the remaining set of things I have to keep in my working memory is reduced, which makes life easier.

Is that similar to how you see this advice?