It may not be as "good design" as functional programming, but functional (in the sense of usable by human beings) it is very good design. It's essentially a flat program that can be interpreted by non-developers, edited on the fly, is incredibly flexible and customizable and is backwards-compatible by 40 years. It's actually pretty damn useful. But I can see how someone might not like just getting things done and would rather design an immutable state functional program to start their ssh daemon.
It's not about getting things done, it's about reliability and repeatability. When you deploy large numbers of nodes in a system you don't want little bits of state causing random failures. You want everything to be as homogeneous and clean as possible.
