I think a lot of the "religious" feeling I get from FP advocates is the constant focus on purity and the "No, you AREN'T DOING IT RIGHT!!!" kinds of tantrums. You HAVE to understand the nuance. You HAVE to participate in these strange little paradigms that esoteric thinkers have come up with. Ultimately, I think of FP languages like Haskell as playgrounds to pilot bleeding-edge ideas before the best ideas get incorporated into languages that are widely used in production.
Ultimately, some real-world processes are just procedural, and procedural languages are easier to apply to them. When it comes to callbacks, mapping functions to a list, etc., it's pretty clear to me that FP paradigms are superior.
In other words, I think it's part fad/religion, but as with anything, you can learn from it and take the good parts.
It's much more complicated at scale. Many conflicts can come from things like backporting or working on a feature in a codebase that deals with a lot of churn (like some drivers or the Linux kernel). Some open source projects have internal versions of the code within the company that eventually gets upstreamed after internal validation takes place, but that version of the code may not rebase for a while for some very good reasons (unresolved instability on the main branch, for instance). In that case, the code base is now both significantly ahead (with internal changes) and significantly behind (due to the other changes that have come from other massive organizations working on the same project). I have published on the topic of merge conflicts a couple times, and even I didn't understand how inevitable massive merge conflicts can be until I joined a kernel integration team at a large company.
Everyone at the top of our class in undergrad were the people who got internships early. I went from being the confused guy who still had decent grades to being one of the people who could go above and beyond. Debugging is weirdly under-taught in school
I have my masters in computer science and work on the Linux kernel at a company you know for a product that you know. I often miss the point of leetcode questions and lose points because I don't use some certain tricky thing that they specifically want me to study for before the interview. I personally think it's just a handy way to build ageism into the interview process, because it's all this academic-style stuff that I've used maybe twice since I graduated 5 years ago. And for people like you, you've probably only really heard about these things in passing because they're not part of most people's workflow.
Kind of like applying for a job restoring Native American artifacts and being asked tricky questions about artifacts discovered in Egypt 5 years ago. Sure, you might have noticed the story or even read a lot about it 5 years ago, but it's not going to be a part of your daily work. Different procedures, different materials, and different local laws? I guess you should get studying if you want this job! And really, I just wanted to see your problem solving style when I ask irrelevant questions!
But ya, I think it's fair to say that my degree helps me not take that sort of thing as a rejection of my intelligence or qualifications though. I don't feel lesser than. I just feel belittled by someone who doesn't put effort into their interviews, which is useful information if you're considering working with them.
Ultimately, some real-world processes are just procedural, and procedural languages are easier to apply to them. When it comes to callbacks, mapping functions to a list, etc., it's pretty clear to me that FP paradigms are superior.
In other words, I think it's part fad/religion, but as with anything, you can learn from it and take the good parts.