I think it's very common in discussions like this for people to conflate 'Python vs Scheme' with from-first-principles (lambdas, explicit recursion) vs building-real-things as pedagogical approaches. In a lot of people's minds, Python is its standard library and Scheme is explicitly cdring down lists.

I think the problem is that SICP's pedagogical approach (which people confuse with the language Scheme) is, in a way, pretty close to starting with assembler. You spend a lot of time exploring computation (with lambdas as your basis) at a very low level before you graduate to anything that feels "real" or practical.