The point is not that you have to import a package, but whether by default package layouts and interop make sense. Notably, python scientific libraries build on a set of common foundations and apis (numpy, pandas etc). Additions to the ecosystem aim to build on familiar apis irrespective of implementation details (e.g dask). Python’s heavy use of namespaces makes organising a working environment simple, while it’s focus on consistent style and naming conventions means that code from different sources will look familiar. R meanwhile uses a global namespace (with at least two ways of loading libraries into it) so requiring more than a few extra libraries risks name collisions. Thus the need to create another ‘tidy’ library to fix a fundamental limitation of the language.