Everything is being reinvented from scratch in the JS world. The insistence on unifying into one language means that a lot of tried tested and true has been tossed aside and it's all being rebuilt sometimes with dubious benefit.
You can say all you want about how fast,optimized and superior SQL is, but the python experience is way better for almost any time you need to make sense of some data.
I've spent years doing the work that you specify above, and pandas & notebooks are probably one of the least good tools for it. SQL is super fast and useful (and everyone understands it, at least in the data world), while dplyr and ggplot2 are basically a DSL for this work, while pandas is an irritatingly bad clone of base-R which manages to keep the bad parts of both Python and R, while having the good parts of neither.
I really feel like you should try Rmd with R if you like the notebook flow, as it's similar but much much better.
If you really want to stick with Python, then org-mode is a much better notebook than anything else.
https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis https://github.com/blaze/blaze