Polars is indeed more verbose when coming from pandas, but in my experience it is an advantage for when you're reading that same code after not having touched it for months.
pandas is write-optimized, so you can quickly and powerfully transform your data. Once you're used to it, it allows you to quickly get your work done. But figuring out what is happening in that code after returning to it a while later is a lot harder compared to Polars, which is more read-optimized. This read-optimized API coincidentally allows the engine to perform more optimizations because all implicit knowledge about data must be typed out instead of kept in your head.
pandas is write-optimized, so you can quickly and powerfully transform your data. Once you're used to it, it allows you to quickly get your work done. But figuring out what is happening in that code after returning to it a while later is a lot harder compared to Polars, which is more read-optimized. This read-optimized API coincidentally allows the engine to perform more optimizations because all implicit knowledge about data must be typed out instead of kept in your head.