R is another language that it is bashed constantly, but it is generally much productive in its field (EDA and stats on structured data) than the alternatives like Python.
Have you played with Shiny (shiny.rstudio.com). If you're building a website for interactive data exploration and analysis, it is very hard to beat.
In the Python ML world only the matrix libraries - numpy and similar APIs like torch.tensor and jax feel natural and click in my brain. The rest - data frame, visualization, scientific libraries; I'm not very sure how to explain it, but it always feels like some context switch is needed between using Python the language, and calling out to these libraries.