I think there are more fundamental differences between functional and imperative programming paradigms (or, perhaps, declarative and imperative programming styles?) than between passing by reference and passing by value (after all, variables are just references, filesystems have links, it just doesn't seem that unfamiliar).

I have definitely seen people struggle to wrap their head around declaring expressions representing what they want to compute when they are very used to imperative control flow like mutating some state while iterating through a loop.

> Kind of reminds me of a sect that promises you great things if only you work hard on leaving all your prior life behind.

I think this is sort of saying "hey this one thing looks like this other thing I don't like, therefore it must carry all the same problems". Perhaps we can call it "the duck type fallacy", but I don't think it's true to say that "anything which tries to change paradigm" is equivalent to cults.