I find declarative style hard because you can’t use a debugger, which means you can’t “go in and look around”. You need to have a theory of what’s happening a p

I find declarative style hard because you can’t use a debugger, which means you can’t “go in and look around”. You need to have a theory of what’s happening a priori that you can test. That means you need to model the internals of the tools in your mind to be able to make guesses. That means a slow learning curve. That’s fine if it’s one of one or two major libraries that you use all the time every day. But in practice most of us are using dozens and dozens of tools, tools which change all the time, and we have to learn as we go. So these “big learning up front” APIs are just not very ergonomic for teams to engage. Unless you’re Rails or React or something where you can claim to be basically a programming language or “standard library” in your own right, something everyone on a team will have already dedicated themselves to studying in depth.