If your work is more focused on statistics or pure modeling, then I agree R wins hands down. The issue is that most projects have "unclean" parts where you have to gather data from multiple sources, use connectors for services, S3 buckets and whatnot; dealing with that mess is where Python really shines.

AI probably changes the equation to some extent, but I still believe I'd rather maintain a complicated data pipeline like that in Python rather than R.

Agreed. If the R community developed more data pipeline frameworks, following the "tidyverse" way of doing things, R would be my go to choice for all data related work.