I have personally seen production code consisting of C and PHP programs with GLOBAL shared state bounced back and forth between dozens of functions simultaneous

I have personally seen production code consisting of C and PHP programs with GLOBAL shared state bounced back and forth between dozens of functions simultaneously, where the parameters reflect only a fraction of the actual input data to the functions' procedures. Expressions and airtight design may seem normal to you, but older generations of programmers either had little exposure to philosophical musings on the constitution of good software design, or received roundly awful early wisdom from the industry's nascence. Of course, C has a habit of enforcing essentially no rules on program design, so it was a wild world of scattershot practices (or anti-practices).