I think the core issue is that OO is one of the first “solve everything” paradigms most programmers learn. Lots of good programmers I know (myself included) have spent a year or two of our careers convinced OO is the solution to every programming problem ever, because it feels so powerful. Some programmers never grow out of that phase.

And that means there’s an OO shaped standing wave in the pool of programmers. Each year the OO wave is made up of different people, but the wave itself is always there because there’s always a new generation of programmers going through their baptism of classes. We have to keep reposting Joe Armstrong’s rant because the sooner people learn non-OO paradigms, the better our field is for everyone.

These debates only feel like zombies to some of us because we’re old, and we’ve yelled at the kids for overusing classes on our lawns plenty of times already. There are some other interesting conversations - like, where is the line between when you would use OO or bare structs or FP? But those conversations are fuzzy and nuanced, and hard to have without real code examples.