It’s about rope. Imperative languages generally give you a lot of flexibility (for x or y) and, therefore, rope to hang yourself. I don’t believe that starting students here, from a pedagogical perspective, is a good strategy. FP languages/paradigms, on the other hand, are all about restrictions(immutability, side effects, etc), and thus less rope. Less places to hang yourself, so to speak.
Also, even though, as you’ve stated sw engineers tend to work in an imperative environment (which I’m arguing is an artifact of their formative years), junior sw engineers should at least start with a bit of trepidation to use that rope (if only in their heads).
Plus, utilizing a functional style (and understanding the whys of functional style, where pragmatic) would improve many aspects of industry (e.g reducing the friction of adding tests - did I mention that I love tests??)
This rope only matters for production oriented systems. Most programmers are doing quotidian processing tasks. Manipulating CSVs, processing data to get statistics on, plotting points on maps, maybe writing a simple automation. Almost every software engineering class I read about when I was a graduate student teaching undergrad classes spent time discussing the pitfalls of the "rope of mutability" and explicitly discussed the idea of immutability to make this kind of programming safer. I agree with another poster that it's just much easier to teach general programming skills and thinking procedurally. I do think that programmers have to unlearn some of this when writing production-grade software, but most programmers will never write anything like that.
Also, even though, as you’ve stated sw engineers tend to work in an imperative environment (which I’m arguing is an artifact of their formative years), junior sw engineers should at least start with a bit of trepidation to use that rope (if only in their heads).
Plus, utilizing a functional style (and understanding the whys of functional style, where pragmatic) would improve many aspects of industry (e.g reducing the friction of adding tests - did I mention that I love tests??)