I don’t think anyone is arguing that the pipe should be the -only- form of composition. Just that it’s a useful form when you have a linear sequence of transformations. Sometimes it’s useful to force something close to being linear into a linear form for consistency, but typically you would switch to an alternate form of composition, typically assigning to intermediate variables.

It’s easy to find examples of using the pipe in ways that I would consider suboptimal. But that doesn’t affect my thesis that, on average, the use of the pipe leads to more readable code.

I was also initially quite sceptical of the pipe, since it is a fundamentally new syntax for R (although obviously used in many other languages). I think the uptake by a wide variety of people across the R community does suggest there’s something there.