I've been programming for 20+ years now, nearly fulltime, and worked with many other programmers for the entire time. There are plenty of good programmers, and they all have a lot of experience. I've learned to tell the difference. It took a long time. Your blanket statement that developers are all bad is simply wrong, there are vast differences between them. Maybe to put it in terms you seem to prefer: some are "less bad" than others. And not everyone is bad in the same way, either.

But you're right, the programmers I'm complaining about will never go away, because there will always be new programmers, and old ones will retire or die.

My only point was that everyone's impression that FP tends to produce higher quality code is largely based on a selection bias from the code you've read, or based on your own attempt to learn the paradigm after already having had some amount of experience.

I witnessed firsthand the rise and fall of many paradigms in programming. I've witnessed it with NoSQL. And Agile. The same thing is likely to happen to Functional Programming, if it becomes too popular too quickly. When you see companies starting to post jobs with "Functional Programming experience required", that's when you're reaching peak, and a bunch of new (bad) developers will come in and ruin everyone's impression of the paradigm.