It was never close. Its synthax is unintuitive and painful to learn as a science undergrad. If it hadn't been python it would have been another language.
Python's rapid adoption really came out of NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib copying the interfaces from MATLAB, which was very widely used before but obviously had a cost associated.
This is obviously a personal thing but tidyverse syntax is great and lends itself very well to clear and concise data operations.
I found base R even easier than tidyverse. Geom?? Puke. Just call the plot function you want from the standard library. Everything is just function(arg1=x, arg2=y). Easy.