For sure, this isn't an indictment against state machines, my message was exactly to be careful when making the decision to use them. They fit a lot of workflow

For sure, this isn't an indictment against state machines, my message was exactly to be careful when making the decision to use them. They fit a lot of workflows and I've also worked in environments where they were not at all a bottlenecks, and regardless of the performance bottleneck it wasn't hard to reason about or adjust which for a long time meant more than performance for that business. I guess I could amend my statement to "be careful about which library or implementation of a state machine you go with"