Actual code i have seen with my own eyes. (Not in F-35 code)
Its a way to avoid removing an unused parameter from a method. Unused parameters are disallowed, but this is fine?
I am sceptical that these coding standards make for good code!
Notably this document is from 2005. So that's after C++ was standardized but before their second bite of that particular cherry and twenty years before its author, Bjarne Stroustrup suddenly decides after years of insisting that C++ dialects are a terrible idea and will never be endorsed by the language committee, that in fact dialects (now named "profiles") are the magic ingredient to fix the festering problems with the language.
While Laurie's video is fun, I too am sceptical about the value of style guides, which is what these are. "TABS shall be avoided" or "Letters in function names shall be lowercase" isn't because somebody's aeroplane fell out of the sky - it's due to using a style Bjarne doesn't like.
I do early returns in code I write, but ONLY because everybody seems to do it. I prefer stuff to be in predictable places: variables at the top, return at the end. Simpler? Delphi/Pascal style.
There is an element of taste. Don’t create random early returns if it doesn’t improve the code. But there are many, many cases where it makes the code much more readable and maintainable.