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On the flip side, I've built several production apps with AASM or Workflow that made adapting to changing business logic a breeze. If you're given a flow-chart you can translate that 1-1 and when that chart changes it's easy to adjust.

It was also really easy to write tests for.

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For sure, this isn't an indictment against state machines, my message was exactly to be careful when making the decision to use them. They fit a lot of workflows and I've also worked in environments where they were not at all a bottlenecks, and regardless of the performance bottleneck it wasn't hard to reason about or adjust which for a long time meant more than performance for that business.

I guess I could amend my statement to "be careful about which library or implementation of a state machine you go with"

This has been my experience as well with AWS Step Functions. Obviously your use case is critical to the architecture decision. For us it's made automating workflows a breeze.

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