Yeah, I don't buy the premise that branchless code is intrinsically easier to understand. Maybe OP's point is that adding unnecessary branches makes code harder to read? But that's generally the case for any unnecessary code.

I see stuff along the lines of:

  if (x == 0) {
      return y;
  }
  
  y += 25*x;
  return y;

  if (count == 0) {
      return;
  }

  for (int i = 0; i != count; i++) {
    puts("hello");
  }