I'm not arguing EE is better than SE or otherwise. My point is specifically that EE has both more complexity and stricter constraints, and both unavoidable due to the nature of it being mechanical as opposed to ideal. Yes, in SE you also have complexity, but you can abstract it away with many tricks like isolating side effects and writing pure functions that are easy to reason, re-running from clean slate at will at little cost or even running your code anew at every request, letting things fail completely and be sure it's cleaned up reliably, etc. In EE, you have enormous implicit state that you can't ignore, the global of time and everything else all at once you must juggle.