To me the functional style is much more easy to parse as well. Maybe the lesson is that
familiarity can be highly subjective.
I for example prefer a well chosen one-liner list comprehension in python over a loop with temporary variables and nested if statements most of the time. That is because usually people who use the list comprehension do not program it with side effects, so I know this block of code, once understood stands for itself.
The same is true for the builder style code. I just need to know what each step does and I know what comes out in the end. I even know that the object that was set up might become relevant later.
With the traditional imperative style that introduces intermediate variables I might infer that those are just temporary, but I can't be sure until I read on, keeping those variables in my head. Leaving me in the end with many more possible ways future code could play out. The intermediate variables have the benefit of clarifying steps, but you can have that with a builder pattern too if the interface is well-chosen (or if you add comments).
This is why in an imperative style variables that are never used should be marked (e.g. one convention is a underscore-prefix like _temporaryvalue — a language like Rust would even enforce this via compiler). But guess what: to a person unfamilar with that convention this increases mental complexity ("What is that weird name?"), while it factually should reduce it ("I don't have to keep that variable in the brain head as it won't matter in the future").
In the end many things boil down to familiarity. For example in electronics many people prefer to write a 4.7 kΩ as 4k7 instead, as it prevents you from accidentally overlooking the decimal point and making an accidental off-by-a-magnitude-error. This was particularly important in the golden age of the photocopier as you can imagine. However show that to a beginner and they will wonder what that is supposed to mean. Familiarity is subjective and every expert was once a beginner coming from a different world, where different things are familiar.
Something being familiar to a beginner (or someone who learned a particular way of doing X) is valuable, but it is not necessarily an objective measure of how well suited that representation is for a particular task.