I did exactly the same things that were suggested in this article, either inverted conditionals, or had a thunk - essentially "jmp nextJump", where that jumped to the actual location.

I sometimes spent a few hours shuffling code around to remove the longer jumps and re-order code in groups closer together to save individual bytes.

    BGEZAL  $zero, . + 8
    ADDIU   $at, $ra, 0
    LUI     $t7, hi16(offset)
    ORI     $t7, $t7, lo16(offset)
    ADDU    $t7, $ra, $t7
    JR      $t7
    ADDIU   $ra, $at, 0