To add some balance:

- I can't rule out that a pandas wizard couldn't have achieved the same speed-up in pandas

- polars code was slightly more verbose. For example, when calculating columns based on other columns in the same chain, in pandas, each new column can be defined as a kwarg in a single call to `assign`, whereas in polars, columns that depend on other must be defined in their own calls to `with_columns`

- handling of categoricals in polars seemed a little underbaked, though my main complaint, that categories cannot be pre-defined, seems to have been recently addressed: https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/issues/10705

- polars is not yet 1.0, breaking changes will happen