I have used Matlab and GNU/Octave in parallel for some years half a decade ago. Octave can do most things that I needed but was slower to run for many things. With Octave you didn't run into licensing problems as those floating licenses had their limits and sometimes I needed to run quite a few instances in parallel.

Now I use Python exclusively. The language is so much better and more sane and almost any library is available. I will never go back.

Today, I would recommend Matlab only in rare circumstances. Currently I cannot think of one use case that I had in the last three years where I would prefer Matlab to Python. Using the Matlab language with a portable Octave installation can be useful for teaching matrix/vector topics to people who have little programming experience and don't know Python. You can get results very quickly. The syntax feels most natural for manipulating matrices and everything seems to be a matrix.

Other than that I think the Matlab language and ecosystem is kind of a dead end. But it will provide profits for a few more decades due to sheer inertia.