[cliftonc]

A lot of the simplification was definitely down to flattening the structure that was represented in 20-30 tables down into a smaller set of documents in ES. But the functional approach to then rendering these documents simplified it further.

A functional map is definitely analogous to a visitor pattern, but don't underestimate how much of a productivity boost arrives by being able to see all of the code in a small set of terse statements in one place, vs having a set of fairly abstract classes with accept/visit scattered all over the place.

We just found that the OO solution resulted in more code and it was more difficult to hold the resulting model in your head as the number of things that could be visited grew - we run a very big site.

The other big enabler vs a traditional CMS approach is that we have a very clear separation between the part of our stack that allows editors to create content, and the part that renders it (connected via messaging) - so we aren't mixing r/w domains and our rendering pipeline isn't burdened with the additional complexity of having to understand how content changes, it just renders what it is given as fast as it can.