> but also about how much knowledge you'd need to keep in your head just to read something

Yeah, but the effect of this is greatly overstated most of the time. As I said, given enough effort, you can learn - and learn to keep in your head - anything. It matters in the short term, while you're learning, but in the long run, once you've learned and internalized all the required information, it stops being relevant.

It's probably harder to learn to read and write kanji instead of the Latin alphabet. For most people, that difference matters for a few years in their childhood, but once they have the characters drilled into them, it no longer matters: they can read and write as well as any Westerner.

The same is true for (natural) languages: some are inherently more complex and hard to learn than others, yet once you become fluent, you stop noticing the complexity. You simply speak, read, and write your thoughts directly, without thinking about grammar and spelling too much.

It's also visible in sciences and engineering. Mathematical notation is especially notorious: not only every symbol can have multiple meanings, but you're expected to also guess which meaning was intended from other symbols and text around. That's on top of introducing hundreds of made-up words for equally made-up concepts, like a "number", or "monoid in the category of endofunctors".

Finally, it manifests in programming and programming languages. In various ways. For example, there are some people who use APL, K, or J - because it's "easier to read and keep in your head a single line of APL than a 500 loc of equivalent C". If given a chance, they will tell you that something like this is of course very readable and straightforward:

⍝ John Conway's "Game of Life".
life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}

You just need to learn a few things first, and that may be hard, but once you do - I'm told - reading and writing code this way becomes effortless, and a thousand times more efficient than writing in C.

Basically, if you're going to be switching languages every year, then yes, there's a difference between having to learn the language for a month rather than six before you can ship something. On the other hand, if you're going to stick with a language for a decade or two, then the long learning process becomes irrelevant, as it's dwarfed by the rest of the time where you actually use the language.

> it still is hard to follow the flow

It may be hard if you're not familiar with the common patterns of using higher-order functions. HOF and lambdas are not GOTO: there's a structure there, it's just richer than the basic set of if/for/while statements. You could call such a structure an FP equivalent of OOP design patterns.

> calls to other functions call back to local lambdas

Yeah, but that's also true for every abstraction, starting with a procedure definition. Also, you don't need lambdas to have this problem, it's enough to register procedure as a signal handler, or register an event handler in some async framework. When you pass a comparator function to `qsort`, you similarly don't know when and how that function will be called, even though it's a named procedure.

To summarize: no matter the language, you can learn it, you can fit all of it in your head, and you can make it readable for you. It requires effort, which is an investment: it might not be worth your while, depending on your circumstances. However, if you encounter a code you don't understand or have trouble with reading, because you didn't invest enough time into learning the language, that's not the code's (or features') fault. Just be honest with yourself and don't blame others for what is a result of your conscious decision.

Also of note: yes, the features often do differ in their complexity, and the differences influence the readability (for lack of a better word). However, to see this and to be able to compare, you have to first learn the features in-depth.