That's written by an opinionated R person/book-writer and stays on a very basic level of anecdotes and hearsay. Some comparisons are super short-sighted. For ex

That's written by an opinionated R person/book-writer and stays on a very basic level of anecdotes and hearsay. Some comparisons are super short-sighted. For example the author seems to consider searching pypi for keywords are reasonable way of finding functions for both quite specific and totally unspecific terms ("spatial data"...). You don't miss anything by skipping this.