"The reason you can use this simpler syntax in R is because it’s non-standard-evaluation ..."

So it actually is about Python vs R.

That said, while this kind of non-standard evaluation is nice when working interactively on the command line, I don't think it's that relevant when writing code for more elaborated analyses. In that context, I'd actually see this as a disadvantage of R because you suddenly have to jump through loops to make trivial things work with that non-standard evaluation.