[flohofwoe]

> My broad takeaway of the whole ordeal is that I'm basically avoiding if-statements these days. I feel like I can't trust them anymore.

Such broad "optimization rules" usually don't make much sense on any compiler created in the last 25 years. An optimizing compiler will analyse and optimize your program's control flow at a very high level, not just naively insert a conditional branch for each if (and that's also true in "low level" languages like C)

If you actually care about such things, you really need to look at the compiler output and incrementally tweak your code (but then other compilers or even compile options might destroy such tweaks again), there hardly is a single optimal source code solution across CPU architectures or even just different CPU models of the same architecture (just don't do any obviously stupid things which make the life of the compiler harder than need be)