I think it's only clear and concise looking because of the achilles heel of this entire thread: terse examples. As soon as you need to do more than a single line of work, the else'd version becomes far more readable (due to superior indentation and clearer guarantees of what happens when).
If it's a single line of return in both branches, then a ternary expression is usually going to be ideal instead.
We can definitely agree that the examples are too simple to present any readability issues with any method of writing them short of an IOCCC entry.
I do not agree with the conclusions you draw at all, but it is hard to continue the discussion without examples. There are definitely cases where an else clause is the natural choice, but I believe that these are in the minority.
If you’ve ever had to deal with various errors or to filter out something and return the appropriate output, it is much more concise. Read past the if’s and you have the main logic of that function.
But that max function should have an else statement since it's part of the logic. Less code doesn't always make it more concise. If there's a more complicated logic, then it'd actually be harder to understand at a glance.
If it's a single line of return in both branches, then a ternary expression is usually going to be ideal instead.