If you haven't looked at the R ecosystem in awhile, there is a package for each of those use cases. (scraping/API: rvest; database: dplyr; parsing text: stringr, etc).
Yes, Hadley Wickham is primarily responsible for the popularity of R.
Yes, Hadley Wickham is primarily responsible for the popularity of R.
If you picked 100 random production python projects out of a hat, no more than a small handful of them would be remotely appropriate to build using R.
And that's entirely fine. R is great at being a quick and dirty statistical analysis language for people doing data exploration.
Plus dplyr essentially allows you to treat tables in a database as if they are data.frames.