This is most easily seen if you consider a TON of the domain specific languages out there. Logo, PostScript, DVI, GCode, etc. Many of these are "move to X" "put down pen", "move to Y", "pick up pen", etc. Very imperative and how you would talk to someone on how to do something.

So, if your objects give meaningful verbs to control the state that they maintain, it works rather naturally to reduce the code that you have.

Now, most OO today, that I see, embraced objects as records. And goes out of its way to not encode any language of behavior in the code they let you write. But, I don't think that is enough of an argument to say that abstracting some active objects into an OO paradigm is a waste and can never help.