[acuozzo]

Yes, and you can also get many of the benefits of OOP with convention and discipline, but doing so requires you to frequently get down in the weeds since, e.g., vtables must be dealt with manually.

The trouble with this approach is that there's a lot of mental overhead in dotting all of your i's and crossing all of your t's. It's draining, so you start to, e.g., shoehorn additional functionality into existing classes instead of making new ones.

You eventually wind up perceiving the abstraction as costly which lessons your use of it at the expense of producing a more elegant solution to the problem(s) you're solving.

tl,dr? The ability to just state "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is transformative when the alternative is telling an entire story every time you want to reference a complex idea.