But then you lose the readability that is the core defense of MATLAB/Octave. Ok so NumPy is readable, but less pleasantly so.
See the benefit of just using what the original mathematician wrote, is that if they had a problem with a way the graph was rendering, or they wanted to tweak it, they just had to edit the code, no translation layer needed. It shipped like any other component of the product at the time.
I have gone further and asked AI to port working but somewhat slow numerical scripts to C++ and it's completely effortless and very low risk when you have the original implementation as test.