This sounds like something that in most other languages, would have become R v2 (non-backwards-compatible)? Why does R retrofit instead of enforce best practices?
The short answer is that "tidyverse" is a set of third-party packages that was developed by a different team than base R. It's not a modification of the language itself. This is possible because of certain features of R that make it particularly syntactically flexible (see, e.g., https://adv-r.hadley.nz/metaprogramming.html).
I know of exactly nobody who was happy with how the Perl 5 to Perl 6 transition went, or the Python 2 to Python 3 transition. I think not ever having a firm cutover like that was beneficial to R.
EDIT: And yes, as citrate05 says, it's just an additional set of libraries. There's no changes to the language itself.
Python wasn’t pretty but I’m happy it was done. Than if we were still on python 2 with only a portion of the changes. There would be a lot of discontent if that was the case too.
