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From what I encountered, this is generally the case when someone is in the "analysis/reports" mode. Rather than get summary statistics on each column, find number of nulls, etc by writing a sql query, they instead get the data into the Python/R instance, and use general purpose functions, utilities, etc. "Programmers are expensive" statement probably applies here as well. I'm not trying to be defensive here, just saying that this might be one reason.

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If you believe "Programmers are expensive", then you should do as much as you can do with a declarative data manipulation language (usually SQL, you can also consider sequences of text manipulations tools using pipes) and leave that last 15-5% of high-value work to a more powerful but also verbose imperative lenguage (usually Python, but any).

Asking for what you want is considerably faster than saying how you want it done.

From what I encountered, this is generally the case when someone is in the "analysis/reports" mode

I understand this use case, but this is in actual application code!

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