Totally agree, I think this whole conversation is a first language thing. I learned pandas first, and found the whole R ecosystem to be a complete mess.

So many different types of object, so many different syntaxes. The tidyverse makes sense, and sure, is elegant, but if your colleagues are using base R. Don't even get me started on docs and Stackoverflow for R. I much, and always will prefer Python.

The one area I still go back to R is on proper survey work. I've looked for years and haven't found anything equivalent to the survey package for Python. I do like that R tends to start from the assumption that data is weighted.

Fortunately I don't do surveys much anymore.