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The only thing that is an extra operation, is the iteration index. So you will have extra n increments for an array of size n. If you compare the number of operations in a loop, n is small compared to what happens in the other functions. If all you do is increment that index, then it is important. Note that the complexity remains the same. In my opinion, even if it may not feel that way, in reality it will almost not register in a benchmark as a difference unless is it is a sample size of epic proportions. And it would increase the time with very little. The advantage of this approach is that it may be helpful to add other such conditional processors, and each can be its own function with a descriptive name, and the cost of this is really small.

My experience shows that once you scale out to thousands of page loads per second, these small things add up. If this is for an internal site with a few clicks per minute, it doesn’t really matter.