I missed your article when it first came out, and I'm glad to have encountered it here; thank you, I think it helps explain some things here and more generally. I do think that this explains why the "Base R" people feel so threatened by the Tidyverse.

What I find interesting about the quoted excerpt, and the article most broadly, is about how it spends very little time discussing what RStudio's economic interest in propagating the Tidyverse actually is. Because, notably, RStudio doesn't charge for the Tidyverse packages. There's no Tidyverse Enterprise Edition, there's no Tidyverse support plans. They mostly make money off their IDE and server products, and those products don't have a lot of meaningful synergies with the Tidyverse packages; there's few IDE features that integrate directly with the Tidyverse, and those that exist aren't very significant. Meanwhile, nothing about the Tidyverse is written to work better with RStudio than with VS Code using the R language server, or with Emacs, or what have you.

This isn't to say that RStudio is doing this for any reason other than economic interest, but the economic interest here is not in convincing R users to use Tidyverse packages; RStudio makes the same amount of money if you do your plots in ggplot or not, and if you switch to ggplot there's nothing about it pushing you to change your IDE/editor.

So what is the business model for the Tidyverse, then? It's pretty straightforward: the goal of the Tidyverse from the perspective of RStudio is to drive R adoption, mostly at places who are using commercial closed-source alternatives to R, like Matlab, or SAS or SPSS. (You could argue that they're competing for mindshare with Python, too, but RStudio has moved to treating Python the way that post-Azure Microsoft treats Linux, as a part of its product portfolio. RStudio's flagship products, the IDE and the Connect server, both advertise first-class Python support. Whether or not they have achieved this is another question, but they certainly are trying.) Once you have converted people to using R, you can sell them IDEs and servers.

I suspect that the "Base R" people have a hard time grappling with this aspect of the Tidyverse business model, because it implies that Base R is _inherently less popular_ than the Tidyverse, which makes their losing less about the whims of a corporation that they can argue is acting in bad faith, but about the preferences of the R community, which they have no power to gatekeep.

Because the point of the Tidyverse is driving adoption among people who were not previously R users, the Tidyverse is able to win over the majority of the community not by persuading holdouts but simply by growing the community with new Tidyverse supporters. I understand how that can feel threatening to someone who was an R user pre-Tidyverse, but you understand why they don't want to focus their message around shrinking the R community. And their efforts to persuade these new people to switch from the Tidyverse to Base R is undermined by the fact that the best argument for Base R over Tidyverse, the familiarity of Base R to someone who learned Base R to begin with, doesn't apply to them at all. They're fighting a losing war with bad weapons.