God the notion that declarative design will somehow fix everything and is the end all be all needs to go away. As people grow more experienced with programming they want more control over the flow of their program, so they can focus on fixing the bugs instead of playing the abstraction game to fix the (internal) bugs, if they can at all.

> Are immediate-mode GUIs up to the task?

Enough for companies like Unity/UE4 to sponsor the github projects.