But data science usually isn't an island.

Use whatever you want on your one off personal projects but use something more non-data science friendly if you ever want your model to run directly in a production workflow.

Productionizing R models is quite painful. The normal way is to just rewrite it not in R.

I've soured a lot on directly productionizing data science code. It's normally an unmaintainable mess.

If you write it in R and then rewrite it in C (better: rewrite it in English with the R as helpful annotations, then have someone else rewrite it in C), at least there is some chance you've thought about the abstractions and operations that are actually necessary for your problem.