Ehhh, as someone who did cognitive neuroscience in grad school and wrote non-stop Matlab 20 years ago, this is correct but insufficient. The toolbox and licensing situation sucked, but that's not why I hated it.

At the time, we had massive issues with using Matlab with large fMRI/EEG/MEG data sets, and attempts to write naive matrix-based versions of code would occasionally blow up memory consumption, and turn a 3-week analysis into a 50-year analysis.

So, yeah, I had to replace a decent amount of pretty matrix code into gnarly, but performant, for loops. Maybe the situation has improved since then, but I don't care to find out.

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Want strings? You had your choice of cells or 2D char matrices? Who ever thought char matrices were a good idea? strfind() vs findstr()? Even after years of Matlab, I had to double-check the docs to recall which one I wanted.

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Anything to encourage reliability or assist scientists in their workflows, like built-in version control? Nope. Or basic testing support for your ad hoc statistical functions? No.

I guarantee there's a ton of Matlab code that produced biased/wrong results, and nobody knows because it produced numbers in the expected range, and nobody ever thought to check it.

Mathworks was in a unique position to improve scientific code quality, and did nothing with it.

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Matlab really excelled at only two things: matrix math and making pretty plots. As soon as you needed to do anything else, it was unbelievably painful, and that's where my personal dislike came from.

Have to agree, working with fMRI and MRI data. Matlab is nearly impossible to debug or even find basic workarounds for problems in this domain, in comparison to Python, because of how closed and niche Matlab is, and the lack of community and trustworthy documentation, or ability to write sensible code with performant for loops.

In my experience, those arguing for the value of Matlab are mostly 50+ years old, or are in an extremely niche industry using something like e.g. Simulink or other highly-industry-specific tooling, in which case it seems the considerations are irrelevant to something like 99.5% of the modern population.

Matlab will clearly be dead and irrelevant otherwise, in a short amount of time and in almost all domains.

EDIT: And few things indicate an out-of-touch / cookie-cutter or almost-certainly p-hacked neuroscience paper like the use of MATLAB. It is a smell for incompetent legacy research in this domain.