Agreed. IMO Tidyverse is a fantastic suite of R packages and worth learning after understanding how to use base R/with minimal dependencies. I personally started with base R and evolved to use tidyverse. Now I use base R when writing R packages and use tidyverse for data analysis/modeling workflows.

I would say this is bad advice. Don’t learn base R, focus on tidyverse. Tidyverse is what people write and use.

I’ll second this, though with some hesitation. If you just want to get stuff done, start with tidyverse. But if and when it’s time to start writing classes and packages, you may have to go back and gather some of the fundamentals.

I agree with both you and GP. Doing heavy stats work in base is pointlessly painful.

Hadley's Advanced R is a great reference for getting down to those fundamentals.

https://adv-r.hadley.nz/

I'm a base R purist personally, but that's mostly because of how long ago I picked it up and don't get any improvements in development speed from dplyr verbs with a few exceptions. But I disagree with this take for beginners especially non-programmers, with the advent of tidyverse it is incredible how fast newcomers pick up enough fluency to handle basic data massaging, analysis and visualisation.

I think exceptions where base-R is necessary can be taught as they arise.