The hardware is also not C style imperative. C/Haskell/Clojure/… are all abstractions that gets mapped to a very complicated extremely parallel hardware state machine. None of the main stream programming languages maps to real hardware. Which is a good thing! We want to use an abstraction that helps us getting the job done faster/better. It does not matter how much the abstraction you use maps to real hardware. As long as it gets the job done who cares?

> I'm not sure what your point is.

I'm pointing out that this is a terrible argument and needs to die: "It is not the way computers work at a hard­ware level"

> it is possible to build "functional" layers of abstraction on top of real hardware.

It's not just possible; I don't see any alternatives gaining traction anytime soon.