[AYBABTME]

I encounter this argument daily and I believe it usually comes from programming dogma of people who read very assertive quotes from Dijkstra.

Most of the time when error checking, returns (or in C, gotos) are fine and lead to more readable code that's easy to make sense of and easy to step through with a debugger.

    Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am 
    terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the 
    uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion 
    out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming 
    could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of 
    coding discipline!

- Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth , quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra