Matlab's moat is that their shit mostly* just works, and most people uaing matlab arent the same ones writing the check. Basically no dependency hell, no random broken libraries, no 30 different 3rd party options that for the same thing. If matlab has it, it almost always works, as expected, and they'll sell it to you and give you support if you have a problem. Stay inside Mathworks domain, you'll have a pretty good time. Basically I'm saying matlab follows the zen of python better than Guido does

As someone who has swapped from matlab to python, mathworks puts in real work from all the money they pull in. Shits expensive, but you get like... 50% of what you pay for. Even better if someone else pays. We did it for the money savings, but it definitely cost us extra dev time doing dependency management and version upgrade testing, and all kinds of little things.

*I got some issues with how they changed how figures are rendered, and that generally was causing issues during the changeover.