In the real world, where many people of varying backgrounds and skill levels are editing the same code, if the OOP method becomes a mess, why wouldn’t the functional approach also become a mess? I think that is more the point OP was making. In a vacuum with a single perfect Adonian programmer, seems like the OOP and functional approaches would becomes the same level of maintainable, because we’re in a vacuum of perfection anyway.

> A. OOP as practically implemented for the last 25 years is glueing functions to state

I see you opt to go with a huge amount of handwaving over the question.

> Functions and structs.

That's what a class is, and thus OOP, except it supports information hiding and interfaces. So your alternative to OOP is... OOP?