Pandas is terrific, yet even its original author has noted inherent shortcomings [1], and there exist alternatives.

Polars seems to be the most prominent competitor in the Python DataFrame space, and DuckDB appears to pursue an approach similar to SQLite, but columnar.

I am personally working on a solution to a broader problem, which can also be viewed as an alternative to Pandas [2].

[1] https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/

[2] https://github.com/ronfriedhaber/autark

For your link [1], many of those issues have been addressed with pandas 2.0 (which I believe Wes Mckinney [pandas' original author] contributed to). So it's a bit disingenuous to point to that post and say "See? Even Wes disowns it!"

That being said, if I were to start a new project requiring that kind of work today, I would probably try Polars first. Their greenfield implementation allowed them to get rid of many of the crusty edges of pandas.