I'm a self-taught programmer, and I'm the lone programmer at a small non-tech company. I've mostly learned by building, and by reading documentation on language

I'm a self-taught programmer, and I'm the lone programmer at a small non-tech company. I've mostly learned by building, and by reading documentation on language features, libraries, etc when I get stuck. I was pretty aware of "tutorial hell" pretty early on and thus avoided it, which by proxy meant I avoided most OOP dogma. I probably worked a lot harder than necessary and reinvented the wheel a few times early on, but at this point I think I write decent code, though I admit I'm somewhat siloed (e.g. I've never been subjected to a professional code review). I recently watched a talk on just what precisely Functional Programming is, and the whole time I just thought "wait, doesn't everyone do this? Isn't this just the overwhelmingly obvious way to write code?" Around the same time, I found myself running into some very OO projects, and simply couldn't understand the actual reason for all of the ceremony and ridiculous amounts of encapsulation. And this wasn't in Java, which of course is infamous for its seemingly infinite amount of ceremony -- this was the documentation of a widely-used GUI library for Python. Like, to my mind, classes are useful when you need to create objects whose values are unknown, i.e. the analogy where the class is a "cookie cutter" which creates the cookies. Classes are perfectly fine for that use-case but by no means should it be that which forms the backbone of your project; my (admittedly limited) view is that stand-alone functions are far and away the lowest-overhead and reliable device for composing parts of a system. I really get the feeling that OOP is sort of like how synths were in the 80s -- everyone just kinda lost their minds for a second and used them everywhere, whether it made sense for the music or not. But from what I can tell, OOP just isn't really the right paradigm for a whole bunch of projects, and often the design of the code vs the design of the thing feels like ramming a square peg into a round hole. Edit: all that said, if the above smacks of the Dunning-Krueger effect, I'd love to be made aware of that.