I think you're probably right that most developers only really had exposure to Matlab in undergrad statistics and engineering courses - sometimes simultaneously

I think you're probably right that most developers only really had exposure to Matlab in undergrad statistics and engineering courses - sometimes simultaneously with Stata *shudder*... But that doesn't mean they're wrong to hate it. It's a proprietary program with origins in the 1970s (that's 50+ years old!) and comes with a lot of cruft. I don't know what university courses are using these days, but a lot of universities have data science majors now, so presumably there is some exposure to Python there. A lot of statistics courses also use R.