Well at least understand it's not the be all and end all.

Care to explain?

I've wasted many, many years thinking OOP is the right way to do things and just realized in 99% it's the wrong approach to develop software. In the end you always end up in a big mess of classes, dependencies. And every now and then new there are new best-practices, design patterns or solutions to fix the problems only to make it even more complex.

Please watch this video. I don't agree 100% but with most of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM

I learned that lesson with the transition from WordPerfect 5.1 to WP 6.0.

The new Object Oriented WP 6.0 macro language was unable to do the things I did with the 5.1 macro language (a typewriter mode for diacritics plus spell checker plus smart commas and smart spaces).

Since then, I have always been an skeptic about OOP.

Also: closures are not too different to instantiated objects, one can usually convert from one style to the other while keeping all functionality.

I've had OOP driven into me since I started learning programming, what would you recommend instead?

I hope you're not being serious.

I really am.