[timoxley]

> calls at the end can still fail and need handling… You can’t conveniently omit the mess that would be created for checking each of those.

For the purposes of this post, it is assumed that any errors produced in those calls will automatically bubble up the stack to some caller or to the top level. In my experience, most JS code is not written with fine-grained error checking around every expression, if there's any explicit error handling at all. The example code isn't intentionally omitting any mess, rather it appears to me to be fairly typical.

The "handing" at the top is mainly for checking function preconditions. e.g. "does it even make sense to proceed?". Early returns help to decouple precondition checking from the important logic of the function, which IMO makes these types of checks easier to write and maintain and thus more likely to exist.