You've heard it hundreds of times over the course of your career and yet you never once questioned it? Either you're exaggerating to make a rhetorical point, or

You've heard it hundreds of times over the course of your career and yet you never once questioned it? Either you're exaggerating to make a rhetorical point, or you have such an apathetic attitude towards the issue that you can't (or haven't tried to) reason about why it polarizes people. Taking your comment in good faith, not all global state manipulation is equivalent. Depending on how you do it, structured global state manipulation could mean have you end up with something like Postgres, where you have orderly read and write interactions that you can reason about with set theory and transaction monotonicity. It could also mean something like using an in memory cache or session store to persist temporarily durable data. Any kind of structuring like this around what you can read and write and for how long gets you further away from the idea of globals, and that's the point. It's a tool that doesn't reward reaching for it prematurely.