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An org usually only hires functional programmers for specialized tasks, and specialization generally pays more. It's not about pay here, but about the nature of niches. The downside career-wise is that is that you have fewer alternatives, domain and geography, if your specialty slumps.

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This sounds like the most likely explanation to me. The only programmers I've personally worked with that wrote code in a functional language for their day jobs were data engineers using Scala for an Apache Spark data pipeline. They weren't paid well because they wrote functionally, they just filled more of a niche role with a higher barrier of entry than a typical web developer.

I've been doing Scala professionally for a decade (so definitely not limited to Spark). There was a clear correlation between Scala jobs being higher paying and more interesting than what I was doing previously.

With React + Redux, a developer ends up writing functional code willy-nilly. If you use promises / futures, your code also has a high chance to end up monadic.

I see that React is also a niche, but it a rather less narrow one than most.

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