Agreed, as an R and polars user. The fundamental advantage R holds over other languages/libraries is expressions. The ability to reference columns directly AND interoperate with vectorized base ops in R is unfair. Of course, this super power is equally confusing to learners, fraught for production code, etc.
do you have a snippet of what this looks like in R?
Not OP, but here is an example using tidyverse (I leave the meaning of it to you; should be clear without any R knowledge):