A lot of people... in fact a huge portion of statisticians, epidemiologists, econometrics, use it as their primary language.

I do genetic epidemiology (which is considerably more compute intensive than regular epidemiology), and R is still the most common language, with the most libraries and packages being used for it, compared to python for example.

I think maybe you should consider being less forthcoming with your opinions on topics which you are not well informed on.