A pipeline-based approach to data processing necessitates a functional programming approach. After all, pipelines are compositions of functions, and loops and variable assignment do not work well with pipelines. You are not precluded from imperative programming, but you need to wrap it in functions.
The package purrr makes functional programming easier. As with the other packages in this book, it will be loaded if you import tidyverse, but you can load it explicitly with:
library(purrr)
I will not describe all the functions in the purrr package; there are many and more could ...
