I feel you're contradicting yourself a bit. Most of my work involved javascript, and me being enamoured by functional programming, I tried applying it as much

I feel you're contradicting yourself a bit. Most of my work involved javascript, and me being enamoured by functional programming, I tried applying it as much as I could. And yet it was only when I used a language that was designed for it that I realized how often I used various 'escape hatches', and when I learned the 'meat' of functional programming. It's possible that I was unusually lazy about it all, but I doubt that. I really was a huge fan of functional programming. But if the language 1) gets in the way (this was pre-arrow functions) and 2) makes it easy to take non-functional shortcuts, it's just too easy to resist. So, as you also say, the 'culture' is biased to non-FP programming. it's hard to go against that without at least some experience with (slightly) stricter FP languages.