Any validation you can write with a few early returns you can write with an equivalent conditional/s followed by a single nested block under it, followed by a single return. The reader is free to leave the validation behind just the same.

And that conditional indents your entire function one level - if you have more validation checks, that's one level of indentation per check (or a complicated condition, depends whether you can validate it all in one place). It's pretty much the case the other user illustrated above.

Returns inside business logic past validation is where the problematic bugs of this class show up

That much we agree. But again, this is not an early return issue, putting too much logic in a function is the issue. Rewriting it without early returns won't make it much clearer. Creating other functions to handle different scenarios will.