Not the person you are replying to, but here are my thoughts: He wrote the tidyverse package/group of packages which includes/is tightly associated with ggplot

Not the person you are replying to, but here are my thoughts: He wrote the tidyverse package/group of packages which includes/is tightly associated with ggplot. It is an extensive set of tools for analyzing and plotting data. None of it is can't be done in base or or with existing packages, but it streamlined the process. It is an especially big improvement when doing grouped/apply functions, which, in my experience, is a huge part of scientific data analysis. For many R users (especially those trained in the past 5 years or so) tidyverse and ggplot are barely distinguishable as libraries as opposed to core R features. I personally don't like ggplot for plotting and do all my figures in base R graphics, but the rest of tidyverse has dramatically improved my workflow. Thanks to tidyverse, while my code is by no means perfect (I agree with all the aforementioned criticisms of academic coding, especially in biology/ecology), it is cleaner, more legible, and more reproducible in large part thanks to tidyverse.