For short scripts and interactive research work, pandas is still much better than polars. Polars works well when you know what you want.

When you are still figuring out things step by step, pandas does a lot of heavy lifting for you so you don't have to think about it.

E.g. I don't have to think about timeseries alignment, pandas handles that for me implicitly because dataframes can be indexed by timestamps. Polars has timeseries support, but I need to write a paragraph of extra code to deal with it.