I know pandas has a lot of technical warts and shortcomings, but I'm grateful for how much it empowered me early in my data/software career, and the API still feels more ergonomic to me due to the years of usage - plus GeoPandas layering on top of it.

Really, prefer DuckDB SQL these days for anything that needs to perform well, and feel like SQL is easier to grok than python code most of the time.