R is so good in part because of the efforts of people like Di Cook, Hadley Wickham, and Yihui Xie to create an software environment that they like working in.

It also helps that in R any function can completely change how its arguments are evaluated, allowing the tidyverse packages to do things like evaluate arguments in the context of a data frame or add a pipe operator as a new language feature. This is a very dangerous feature to put in the hands of statisticians, but it allows more syntactic innovation than is possible in Python.