I’m not disagreeing with that statement at all. You missed my point that there are thousands of people making small Python scripts for education and personal projects everyday. In those circumstances the performance concerns are irrelevant and the ergonomics of good pandas documentation and community knowledge make it a better choice.

That inertia is not a good thing, and it's partially why there's stagnation in data science. Polars is more than mature enough in both documentation and resources for it to be a daily driver.