[dwohnitmok]

To continue with my devil's advocacy...

> It is just the natural result of passing state as explicit arguments.

But nothing you've mentioned here is intrinsic to mutable state. It seems like all that's happened is you identified a part of your program that you wanted to be configurable and exposed a configuration knob. If for example you wanted to make it so that there is a test mode that where you want to prefix "test-" to every string written to the DB that would also probably involve a new argument somewhere. There's nothing here special about the mutable state part of it.