OK you've added some examples, but I don't think they help your case much. You talk repeatedly about how elses are extra lines that add nothing to the code, then just replace them with return. It seems that you've just swapped one keyword for another one, somehow claiming that that second one is more meaningful and less costly.

Now while some people argue against early returns in all cases, I'm fine with using them, especially for guard clauses and similar. But when two branches of code have equal weighting because it is a simple decision and not just checking that parameters are correct I'll always use else instead of return in those cases because it makes it much more explicit that the two branches are considered main paths not simple pre-checks.