One benefit is that if you persist the state on transition, you can create a program that survives restarts and crashes. The pattern is very useful if you have

One benefit is that if you persist the state on transition, you can create a program that survives restarts and crashes. The pattern is very useful if you have tasks with very long run times that need to be orchestrated somehow. There are also some parsers that can be very rough to implement in an imperative fashion.