> there's some nonsense interspersed here, e.g. the claim that R has "a more mature package universe" than Python.

As a programmer, I find R hard to use and not very well designed, so I can see why you'd call that nonsense.

But when I was a math student, I found that in some ways R does have "a more mature package universe". There were many math algorithms that I could find packages for in R and not in Python, even as a mere grad student.