I'm not just talking about Java - I've also seen this in mobile projects in Swift for example. > And with most people being more familiar with imperative style

I'm not just talking about Java - I've also seen this in mobile projects in Swift for example. > And with most people being more familiar with imperative style, it makes the functional style harder to maintain for them. It has nothing to do with functional style. It's perfectly feasible to write functional code with minimal abstraction which is easy to trace and understand. The problem is in handing over your flow of control to an overly complex black box of an abstraction layer.