Of course, I once was that physicist! Now I prefer working with arrays and functions that receive arrays and return arrays, even in the top-level, user-facing script.
But who knows, maybe there will be a next stage in the journey!
I used to work at a company that wrote an atomic scale simulation package. Every dev was a physics/chemistry PhD turned coder. We didn't quite hit one comment for _every_ line of code, but we were close! At first I really hated this style; one comment every few lines. However, I eventually learned to kind of like it, even though it was a bit redundant.
I don't really have a point here, but I just wanted to echo your statement that the physicists-turned-coder style is real!
(a) is the calculation itself the end goal--e.g. am I trying to draw a plot which shows the motions of the three bodies?
or
(b) am I trying to use the code which describes the motion of the 3 bodies as a modular part of a system to answer other questions, perhaps interactively.
If everything is a one-off, and you're working on a very small team, of course excessive abstractions make little sense. But that's not how engineering is done. Abstractions are really important, because they allow us to collaborate.
Anyway, to each their own, it's fine for people who somehow think because there are wrapper methods everywhere a code is "cleaner". I just submit that this really is a aesthetic preference, and that instead of trying to "fix" other professions, understand there are often reasons why things are that way when everyone in a field works that way.