I tried writing in this "safe" way for quite a while, but I found the number of bugs I wrote was much higher and took way longer than just using railroad-style

I tried writing in this "safe" way for quite a while, but I found the number of bugs I wrote was much higher and took way longer than just using railroad-style error handling via early returns. The problem with having an explicit else for every if block is that the complexity of trying to remember the current context just explodes. I think a reasonable reframe of this rule would be "Every if-conditional block either returns early or it has a matching else block". The pattern of "if (cond) { do special handling }" is definitely way more dangerous than early return and makes it much harder to reason about.