You're right, they're not really "early returns" but for me at least they are often in similar fashion to the "early exit" pattern in the article:

    def transform_data(raw_data) when length(raw_data) == 1, do: []
    def transform_data(raw_data) do
        # actual function code goes here
    end

That said, I wouldn't want to see the above snippet in my team's codebase :)