I feel similar when it comes to non-OOP code. I don't like free functions and global variables just hanging there.

OOP might have helped popularize usage of the dot notation, but namespaces are a different thing.

Zig has no inheritance but everything is namespaced, including declaring functions inside struct definitions so that you can use them as if they were methods.

Yeah, me neither. Names must belong to some namespace, it really bothers me when code starts binding common nouns in a global context. C lacks namespaces so I use prefixes instead. At least this solution doesn't screw up the ABI like in C++.

I hate global variables so much it's one of the reasons I got rid of libc. Freestanding C turned out to be a superior language just because it lacks all the libc cruft.

I ultimately dropped Ruby because of global state. It's such a wonderful language but it has one fatal flaw: lack of proper modules. The require method just executes Ruby source files, modifying the global state of the interpreter. It ceased to be a beautiful language once I realized this. Python's modules are superior, and the Javascript approach is the best one: just a normal function that returns a normal object containing exported data and functions. Javascript modules are c.ompletely reified.