My experience from writing a lot of array-based code in NumPy/Matlab is that broadcasting absolutely has made it easier to write my code in those ecosystems. Axes of length 1 have often been in the right places already, or have been easy to insert. It's of course possible to create a big mess in any language; it seems likely that the NumPy code you saw could have been neater too.
In machine learning there can be many array dimensions floating around: batch-dims, sequence and/or channel-dims, weight matrices, and so on. It can be necessary to expand two or more dimensions, and/or line up dimensions quite carefully. Einops[1] has emerged from that community as a tool to succinctly express many operations that involve lots of array dimensions. You're likely to bump into more and more people who've used it, and again it seems there's some overlap with what Rank does. (And again, you'll see uses of Einops in the wild that are unnecessarily convoluted.)
[1] https://einops.rocks/ -- It works with all of the existing major array-based frameworks for Python (NumPy/PyTorch/Jax/etc), and the emerging array API standard for Python.