The problem is that pure structured programming just sucks. It doesn't have a good answers for cleanups or error handling.

Structured programming was the answer to the earlier mess with unstructured gotos, but in the process of trying to improve it, structured programming became just as messy when taken dogmatically.

In real life, what matters is the mental load. Every ambient condition that you need to track adds mental load. Early returns/breaks/continues reduce it while in a "structured program" you have to keep track of them until the end of the function.

> It's not that hard -- you just have a variable and you set it to what you want to return and the last line of the function returns that variable.

And also have a flag "skip to return" to skip all the conditions. Or you end up mutating arguments of the function. I know, I suffered through programming on Standard Pascal.

It all boils down to the fact that ideas should be viewed as tools rather than dogmas, and famous people are neither infallible nor prophets simply because they had a few good ideas.