I had to write a normal codebase in R exactly one time and it was one of the weirdest and most unpleasant coding experiences I've had. After that, I decided R is tidyverse and a handful of stats libraries. If you need more, reach for another tool.
I never understood the appeal of tidyverse. I have a colleague who, like you, thinks that R is tidyverse. He also has the nasty habit of starting Excel formulas with a '+' sign.
The main attraction of tidyverse is that it's easy to copy-paste code for common cases. If there's no ready recipe for something, it's usually just not done, or some "technical person" is called to do it.
R is used mostly as a fancy calculator, which is fine in itself, but it makes the comparisons to general purpose languages like Python quite apples-to-oranges.
I've done only very simple ML stuff using R and it never feels like exactly the right tool.