I don't 100% disagree. The reason is that the lambda approach is much more declarative; it's a composition of parameterized parts using a standardized interface

I don't 100% disagree. The reason is that the lambda approach is much more declarative; it's a composition of parameterized parts using a standardized interface. That means it can easily be parallelized, for example, and if Java were a little more introspectable, it might even be distributed, restartable or even converted into code in a different system, like LINQ targets SQL. Toy examples are toys; they're usually easily broken, since the simplicity required for pedagogy leaves a poor ratio of problem difficulty to solution power. I wouldn't write the example code as a stream either, but I much prefer the approach when the complexity level increases only slightly.