I'm not expert on Elm, but to take a guess, I'd say that it's about different tradeoffs. And "waste" is conditional, if (like you wrote) you're actually making

I'm not expert on Elm, but to take a guess, I'd say that it's about different tradeoffs. And "waste" is conditional, if (like you wrote) you're actually making use of the dynamism, immutable data structures, meta programming facilities and whatnot, it's not waste.