As programmers, we often confuse the means with the ends. We tend to over-emphasise the way in which code is written and we tend to forget about whether the code is doing the right thing.

That being said, I love map/filter/flatMap. Look at them as higher level loops.

For example: A while loop is very general, you can implement any kind of loop with it. This makes it harder to understand the meaning of the loop. Therefore, when you want to iterate a constant number of times, you'll likely use a for loop. It expresses your intent better. Map, filter, and flatMap are just extending this principle to more specialised use cases. The advantage for a reader is that the one word "map" already tells them a lot about what the loop body is good for.