I think we’re only fooling ourselves if we think there is an absolute answer to anything. You simply can’t answer these in a simplified catch-all absolute way. For me it is important to keep this in mind when discussing these. (And btw I think @Nate_Pearson @Jonathan and @chad are doing an excellent job on the podcast to always answer question within context).
How does it actually work when people seek scientific answers? You have a group of people and let them do perform some physical task, like a time to exhaustion workout. Then you give something to some of them and not to the others, but don’t tell anyone who gets what to minimize psychological effects. Then let them perform the task again and see how the groups differ in their performance. Usually you have 10 or 20 participants and usually the results are between nothing to a few percent of difference. That’s how close it is. And with that you try to answer the question. So it never actually is “Doing x will impact your performance by Y”, but more like “the evidence we’ve gathered under these circumstances suggest that there is high probability that doing X might influence you performance to some degree”.
Regarding electrolytes there might be evidence that it didn’t impact performance in a / some / all studies looking at “2 hours endurance tasks”. What does it mean? 2hr all out? Easy pace? Running? Cycling? What else was given? as it hot? How well were the participants stocked up on electrolytes coming into the test? How does it apply to 3 hour workouts? What about an ironman triathlon in the heat? How about a sub 3 marathon?
I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t search for an absolute truth, because there never is one. Learn what science says, to evidence and studies point to always in the context of how these results were obtained, Ask your own questions and do some experiments yourself (which is fun!).