I agree R would have been "fine" without Tidyverse-- in the sense that it would keep a persistent survivable niche base. I suspect, however, that it would not

I agree R would have been "fine" without Tidyverse-- in the sense that it would keep a persistent survivable niche base. I suspect, however, that it would not be anywhere near the top 10 of the TIOBE index like it is now and that it's userbase would consist of mostly of statistics practitioners rather than huge swathes of people that need to perform any basic data analysis.