Cross-link to my belief system on “declarative”:
Mutating a declarative representation is wonderful once you gain some fluency with it, but gaining that fluency becomes a hurdle. And a lot of declarative representation is very hard to wrap your head around. For example nobody it seems can guess ahead of time what any non-trivial CSS will do. With simple imperative programs I feel like I can always understand things to arbitrary levels of detail. Whereas with CSS I’m stuck cargo-culting black boxes. Declarative representation is nice if you consider just the declarative code in isolation, but realistically I think it can still be intimidating proportional to the size of the implementation. At that point, is it maybe better to just write imperative code in a very simple way?
Definitely a weak opinion, though. Maybe we just don’t know how to implement good declarative notations yet.