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It's not just an opinion.

With mutability, it's still possible to make things immutable if properly encapsulated.

If everything is immutable by default and you need mutability for some reason, good luck.

The heuristic is simple too. If you need something to be mutable, you should deal with pointers. So *Player and []*Player here.

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I always felt like it was kind of the other way around? Speaking from experience , most languages where immutability is the default and/or the only option can usually simulate mutability or have it as a stdlib-provided escape hatch (elixir and haskell come to mind), but most languages that are mutability-first really struggle to provide any sort of immutability that is reliable.

At a datastructure level, perhaps, although functional datastructures are pretty fringe. (cf. Okasaki) In general, they can still be implemented by traditional imperative languages (obviously).

At the type/variable level, it's the opposite. We see it with const. Once it's in here, it's in there.

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