Fun aside - I actually used polars for a bit - first time I tried it, I actually thought it was broken, because it finished processing so quickly I thought it silently exited or something.
So I'm definitely a fan, IF you need the DataFrame API. My point was that most people don't need it and it's oftentimes standing in the way. That's all.
Polars is very nice. I’ve used it off and on. The option to write rust udf’s for performance, easy integration of rust with Python with pyo3 will make it a real contender.
Yes, I know spark and scala exist. I use it. But the underlying Java engines and the tacky Python gateway impact performance and capacity usage. Having your primary processing engine in the same process compiled natively always helps.