I'm interested in hearing any reasons in favor of the practice, maybe it will help me feel less twitchy when I have to follow it.

I feel like it's bad practice for the same reason as everyone else on the internet says it is: it opens up a hole for a careless mistake if you are code refactoring or simply adding a second statement that you want to occur inside the "if". I've been bitten by this issue more than once, enough to get annoyed at the practice.

But I certainly would like to hear some positive benefits of it, other than that it's fewer lines of code and it's slightly cleaner to the eye.