Wow, the idea that the Tidyverse is somehow burdened with an overabundance of computer science or functional programming is just hilarious to this programmer who has had to maintain, debug and optimise other people's R code.
I tend to agree. I've found tidyverse code has a write-only quality to it. Since I'm going to see more of it I plan to dive into the inner workings of at least dyplr and purr.
That said it is hard to deny what Hadley Wickham has done for the R community and I can't write off the idea that he sees a bigger picture I'm missing.
Correct usage requires learning the right abstractions, but fortunately these abstractions are shared across language communities and frameworks.
If you are doing any data processing work and you do not know about foundational functional concepts ie map/reduce then I would argue the code you write is less readable, overly focused on the idiosyncracies of how to do something rather than how entities and data are related to each other - their logic and structure.
The main optimization is to be correct and expressive of one's intention and purpose. If you need performance use Julia.
So they end up with a subset of functionality they can get stuff done with, but then they need to collaborate with someone who uses a different subset. That can be messy.
I think in an environment where everyone learns R from the same course/book/MOOC/whatever (or have done lots of different sorts of programming) and the organization can impose a style guide the tidyverse approach would be great, but when you have people coming from all sorts of places and backgrounds I don't think it's a good fit.