Imperative boilerplate does not have as many degrees-of-freedom as functional composition, thus it is akin to claiming we can optimize globally instead of locally. Although immutability is O(log(n)) slower than the ideal imperative code, I will soon attempt to argue it is actually faster in practice because only locality of optimization is realistic.
My conceptual intuition or understanding derives from my theoretical interpretation that the universe is composed of partial orders, for if there was a total ordering it would require the speed-of-light to be infinite so that the single top-down observer could be omniscient in real-time, but this would collapse the past and the future into an infinitesimal pointless nothingness. Our existence is predicated on friction. Friction imparts the fundamental matter of the universe which is the continuum of the frequency domain, and this is why the order of the universe is fractal, and there is hidden order (the strange attractor in Chaos theory) in fractal cross-correlation. In other words, the less localized (functional composition modularized) our paradigm, the less entropy our paradigm can handle before it losses its order (in a soup of incomprehensible cascading spaghetti which is effectively indistinguishable from noise):
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy