[HellzStormer]

I disagree that it's just there to handle edge cases. It's a useful generalization.

I think the "Building an intuition" section of my blog post[1] makes a good case for that.

  When dealing with loops, you have 3 nested constructs interacting: a wrapping function, a loop statement and the loop's body; and you have 3 keywords to choose where the flow of the code goes.

    return returns from the wrapping function
    break leaves the loop statement
    next / continue leaves loop's body

  When dealing with blocks or anonymous functions, it's instead 3 nested "functions" that are interacting: a wrapping function, a called function and an anonymous functions (or block).

    Ruby's blocks, let you use the same 3 keywords to choose where the flow of the code goes.

    return returns from the wrapping function (ex: my_func)
    break returns from the called function (ex: each, map)
    next returns from the block

  Quite consistent. But since we are talking about functions instead of statements (loop), return values are also involved. Allowing both break and next to provide a return value fits well in that model and is quite useful. The 3 keywords are basically return, but they have different targets.

[1] https://maxlap.dev/blog/2022/02/10/what-makes-ruby-blocks-gr...