> but what’s the benefit of going with a walled off proprietary $$$ tool when you can use something like this

My day-to-day stack nowadays is mostly Python with a smattering of others, but I’ve been using MATLAB for almost 15 years.

Like any other enterprise software, you’re paying for support and generally very good documentation. If you have a technical issue or even just a development question you get a response from a human within a day or two, often just a few hours.

There are also many domain-specific tools (e.g. Simulink) that do not have similarly functional open alternatives. Octave is great, but can lag behind new language features and generally isn’t 100% cross compatible. Whether or not this affects you is really dependent on your use case.