I'm very simple. I see Richard Feldman post. I like it. I'll leave it to the experts as to whether this is a case of opportunistic mutation.

Much of the difference in optimizability is that C/C++ allows you to do fairly extreme copy elision. This is important because memory bandwidth tends to be a major performance bottleneck.

C/C++ code can trivially reach into some remote bit of state and mutate it directly. The compiler rarely objects, no matter how ugly the access method or pattern. It is up to the programmer to make sure the invariants hold and the compiler can’t always see through it. These elided copies add up, though it usually has a maintainability and safety cost.

It is related to why functional languages tend to be mediocre for supercomputing in practice despite having nice properties for massive parallelism in theory.