This is a common complaint I get all the time (heard it this week while teaching pandas). I compare this to whitespace indentation in Python.

Lots of folks complain about it before using it. After they use it it is a non issue.

If it really is an issue (and it generally isn't a cause of vectorization removal when used correctly) and you can't get over the syntactic noise if the lambda, pandas 3 introduced pd.col (that work in most (I filed a big about some exceptions) places when you'd use lambda).

Ive seen it in such a wide variety of scenarios where it causes vectorisation removal because of its implementation that I dont reach for it by default any more. I've a number of devs around me who have similar opinions. Each know how to use it, but you dont always write the code you're reviewing or optimising.