I can definitely imagine a functioning world without it. But what you mean is a functioning capitalist world, which yeah, would be impossible without money. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t have a perfectly functioning post-scarcity world without money, it just wouldn’t fit into your narrow idea of what the world should look like.
And that’s not an insult to you, it’s something most people suffer from. We’ve done things one way so long, the idea of doing it any other way is so alien to us, we reject it as impossible. But we’ve done things before that people thought were impossible.