I used to use early returns a fair bit in Python and Ruby (my primary languages). But lately I've been working with Elixir which doesn't support early returns

I used to use early returns a fair bit in Python and Ruby (my primary languages). But lately I've been working with Elixir which doesn't support early returns and while Elixir does have some tricks up its sleeve to better handle the idea of having an early return without using it (such as pattern matching on function arguments and / or guards), I'm now slowly shifting into thinking early returns in any language makes things more difficult to reason about in the end most of the time. I say "most of the time" because for very short functions where you might return early to avoid an else clause or deal with varying types of input, that's not too bad. It's really a problem in the use case you explained where you have a larger function that might have 4 or 5 early returns scattered about and that function might be nothing more than having a few short if statements that say "if this, then do_something and return". It becomes difficult to maintain because now the function ends in 5 different spots based on 5 different conditions.