Regarding having tons of exit points, I find it actually adds no more cognitive load to use only a single return per function, compared to having multiple returns and keeping resource-freeing up-to-date for each.

Most of the challenge in writing code with a single return seems to come from the fact that I'm not used to doing it. Of course, sometimes it leads to heavily nested control flow, although I'm not sure yet whether or not I mind that. It does certainly simplify reasoning about control flow though, especially in large functions.

That all being said, I'd still rather just have defer.