They can use it because they don't come with preconceived notions of how programming normally works. And it let's them do powerful analysis without much boilerp

They can use it because they don't come with preconceived notions of how programming normally works. And it let's them do powerful analysis without much boilerplate code along with a library of packages for an enormous range of analytical methods and visualization, all without having to do much in the way if boilerplate coding. Sure the syntax is going to seem alien to them, but so would any first encounter with a programming language. The use case for R simply isn't a traditional programmer. That isn't the target user. Sure if you need an application that might need significant scale you're not going to use R Shiny, but a lot of R work are one-off bespoke analysis projects. Models that do need to be deployed for use at scale in an application take their output parameters from R models and simply implement them in the app. I do this myself, taking coefficients etc, implement a function call in a database and then use the results on the front end.