Yes, the newer "pivot_wider" and "pivot_longer" are just much cleaner and nicer than the 25 different half-broken way you can use in pandas. Luckily I don't have to do a lot of data engineering anymore, because R is just not fun for large projects while pandas is very unergonomic
I did and honestly both ways I tried (pivot and melt) looked disappointing compared to tidyr. I just don't like the reliance on indices (and the stateful API that comes with it) in many operations, like in pivot
