> if FP is "better"

The term FP has lost precise meaning over time, and split into several related meanings.

• Focus on the absence of side-effects. (E.g. Agda, but not Scala, Ocaml, F#)

• Focus on the higher-order functions. (This is no longer controversial, but used to be)

• Focus on rich types. (The ML (the programming language) tradition, note that Lisp and even Lambda-calculus were born untyped)

• Focus on the use of traditional functional idioms, e.g. map-reduce, even when the implementation is totally not functional.

Which one are you referring to?