Yep this is a huge cultural problem with the Scala community. On paper and in marketing material, Scala is flexible enough to empower you to slip into mutable/OOP style or more FP style. But in practice the pure FP enthusiasts are the ones who totally dominate the ecosystem (aside from Haoyi Li). You simply cannot just ignore the Haskell Larpers/Wannabe's and get on with it, because they infect all the community watering holes like Reddit, Gitter and Discourse. Every time one talks about using non-pure-FP features of the language, they have to go through the same tired patronizing lectures about how "yes I know this is not 'safe'" and "yes I know what I'm doing" and "I'm very sorry that I am not as smart as you smart FP people" before you can actually talk about what you want to talk about.