Unlike many other languages, R has a native/built-in tabular data structure. So when your data have tabular structure R is by far the best glue for building pipes between external libreries. If the data fits in RAM it literally doesn't have to leave the data.table object throughout the whole pipeline (including all the cleaning and transformations).
The only meaningful alternative I see is Python with maybe Polars or DuckDB.
The only meaningful alternative I see is Python with maybe Polars or DuckDB.