Unironically yes, it really is that bad. A moderately bad language that happened to have some popular data science and math libraries from the beginning. I can

Unironically yes, it really is that bad. A moderately bad language that happened to have some popular data science and math libraries from the beginning. I can only imagine it seemed like an oasis to R which is bottom tier. So when you combine data scientists, academics, mathematicians, juniors, grifters selling courses… things like bad package management, horrible developer experience, absolutely no drive in the ecosystem to improve anything beyond the “pinnacle” of wrapping C libraries are all both inevitable and symptoms of a poorly designed ecosystem.