R sucks for any real programming tasks that you don't hardcode every single thing. It sucks at loading modules from your own project. It sucks to find the path of the script you're executing.

Bacially everything is stateful in R. You call standard library functions to install third party libraries ffs. And that operation can invoke your C compiler.

Putting R and a repo in a docker container to run it in a pipeline where nothing is hardcoded (unlike our datascience guy's workspace) was the worst nightmare we had to deal with.