I was watching a recent talk about the new Mojo language [1]. There is a section on SIMD and how they treat scalar values as a special case of vector operations (around the 33 min time).

It does seem that tensors are one of the core abstractions for modern ML systems. I've heard people joke that AI is just matrix multiplication. Python is such a flexible language that creating abstractions around its syntax was super easy. I believe that was part of the reason Python has come to dominate this space (not the only reason obviously).

I too felt the same as you, but as a distant admirer of Zig. I totally understand that operator overloading can be misused. But I have an intuition that at least providing operators for linear algebra (and probably complex/quaternion) is a really important feature for any languages from this point in history going forward.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEwTjZvy8vw&ab_channel=LLVM