My wife has been learning Python (not a programmer) and now is looking at R. I thought she was going to like it as I personally think RStudio is nice. I was surprised she didn't like Rmarkdown after being exposed to Python notebooks, in particular she loved vscode + notebooks and immediate feedback and didn't like at all not having the markdown in RStudio interactively rendered and the R REPL. I have used very little R and I'm a heavy Python user so maybe I didn't know how to help her more effectively. I think I helped solving the main Python pain points: installing anaconda, vscode, the python extension and some additional auto completion. I don't use vscode (use Emacs) but it's great it's available for newbie users :p. Also, having Colab was nice for simple things.

To summarize: I think notebooks are great for newcomers. It requires more maturity to appreciate more principled programming.