> syntactic sugar

To be fair, all languages are syntactic sugar over asm which is s-s over CPU machine code. A mental model is just that: a model for something physical that's in your head. FP or OOP are both mental models for programming in nearly any language. Some languages have first-class FP or OOP features, and some don't, but you can tack-on either of these, and others, to nearly any language you want to. It's really dumb to look down on others choice of mental model if it works for them. I have seen successful projects that were designed around both OOP and FP models.