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.