I disagree.

I personally think we should write code in a manner that is easier for other developers to understand and work in.

As Martin Fowler said “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. “

Don’t get me wrong, I do think performance is important, but everything is a trade off.

Of course there are some calculation-intensive operations where you may need to extract every bit of performance from the JavaScript engine, but probably 98% of projects probably don’t fall under this bucket. Also in that case you are probably better off using something like Rust.

I think a declarative approach to programming is a paradigm that you can either take it or leave, just like an other paradigm.

It's just something in the toolkit that people can decide to use or not use.

I do agree my examples were somewhat contrived but that was kind of the point.

I am not going to lose sleep or agonize about a few bytes or a microsecond difference in performance. Life is too short :)