I love and use R, but it never became the dominant ML in part because it has three (or more) different object systems and many libraries sort of use their own style.

This makes it seem a bit disjointed, in a way that other languages don’t.

The R community should have anointed one object system and made tidyverse a core part of R.

All that said, R is fantastic and the depth of libraries is extensive. Libs are often written by the original researchers that develop the method. At some academic institutions an R package is counted as a paper.