[OkayPhysicist]

Your language should not care about the physical reality of the machine. That's the compiler's job, and the CPU microcode's job. And thankfully, every programming language ignores physical reality, including Assembly.

The goal of a programming language is to allow a human to express a sufficiently rigorous solution to a problem. From there, every step along the chain of execution is allowed to make 'unobservable' (for various definitions of the word) changes to execution. Your compiler might unroll your loops, or eliminate some unneeded intermediate variable, or even replace your entire function with a lookup table. Your CPU's microcode might do some weird fuckery with predictive execution. You shouldn't care, as long as the solution is, as far as you can observe, identical to your given one.

Whether functional programming is a better expression of computation than imperative programming is its own problem, but it's both silly and wrong to assert that imperative is better because it matches the behavior of the machine.