I have mostly programmed in Python and used np.array for nearly that entire time.

Do other languages handle multi dimensional arrays the same way that Python/numpy does? As elegantly? (or better?)

in my experience, language-supported MD arrays aren't great. I think what numpy does under the hood (define a pointer to allocated memory, along with a struct that defines the data type and array dimensions) is probably the best approach. This has worked in C since John started programming in it.