However what still makes it a great choice is that it still a relatively simple language compared to C, and maps mathematical formulas to code very well. Inelegant code will still run reasonably fast (which is not the true with C) - so all of these points make it actually a good language when the program is being written by domain experts (i.e., scientists) rather than professional programmers or software engineers.
What do you mean by inelegant code in this context?
Non-idiomatic? Like non-Pythonic in the case of Python?
There's also fewer traps to fall in than C++ which is elephant sized in scope to Fortran's mouse.
I have heard that Fortran is very very good at optimizing array processing due to lack of aliases. That may be one answer today. There’s also value in continuity: in using a language for your task because it can build on what others have built. That applies to any established language, of course… but I could see it reasonably applied if someone wrote some kind of numerical processing library today. They’d write it in Fortran and call it from Python!
If nobody with domain knowledge can understand the program because it's written in a language unfamiliar to them (such as C) with tons of traps and pitfalls (such as C), the value of its contribution to the corpus of knowledge is diminished.