I definitely was not: I would argue for structured logic rather than implicit state. The idea you are discussing seems to be more about imperative vs. functional design, and that would also be a lot better... but these are Google engineers managing a million interacting state machines via a giant pile of global (mutable) state, resulting in tons of bugs such as this one that isn't even fixed yet:
https://issues.webrtc.org/issues/339131894
A reply I just left elsewhere on this thread, noting that "state machine" doesn't imply the clean perfectly-factored concept you'd learn in a computer science class: these are ad hoc state machines that result from having a number of developers who don't really care and who think they can "dead reckon" the state of the system if they just add enough transition functions.
Yeah that doesn't sound good. I understand the point you are making now and agree.
Now, if we said to someone to model a weather prediction via state-machine- that would be obvious madness. But if we take a small object (like a cubic meter of air) and modelled that part to handle inputs and transfer forces, that generic statemachine will do the job- because the atmospheric ocean of statemachines knows more about the whole system, than a single statemachine.
My point is- there is state in a system, that is not explicitly modeled.
For a state machine, I would expect a function such as:
transition : (old_state, event) -> new_state
Or if we use immutable objects, and one method per simple event, then something like:
transition_event1 : () -> new_state
Which I think is similar to what you hace. So I think we are in agreement here.