It's almost certainly not, as R has plenty of batteries, and young nitwits in the Hadleyverse are writing preposterous node-like dependency graphs. It's fashion, and it should be curb-stomped.
It's a useful counterexample because the problem didn't exist for the 20 years before legions of nodejs bros descended upon it and bestowed upon us the mess of hot garbage it is today. At this point, there is an entire half of the ecosystem which is unusable unless you drink the 400 dependency kool aide.
To be fair though, there isn't as much good introductory resources on base R, that aren't very discipline specific.
I do completely agree otherwise, but those people will learn through bitter, bitter experience that those dependencies will break over time and will see the light that is base R.
It's almost certainly not, as R has plenty of batteries, and young nitwits in the Hadleyverse are writing preposterous node-like dependency graphs. It's fashion, and it should be curb-stomped.