Indeed. feather was a library to exchange data between R and pandas dataframes. People tend to bash pandas but its creator (Wes McKinney) has changed the data ecosystem for the better with the learnings coming from pandas.
Really, prefer DuckDB SQL these days for anything that needs to perform well, and feel like SQL is easier to grok than python code most of the time.
I switched to this as well and its mainly because explorations would need to be translated to SQL for production anyways. If I start with pandas I just need to do all the work twice.
The harder thing to overcome is that pandas has historically had a pretty "say yes to things" culture. That's probably a huge part of its success, but it means there are now about 5 ways to add a column to a dataframe.
Adding support for arrow is a really big achievement, but shrinking an oversized api is even more ambitious.