It’s not about bias, it’s about cost. The basic MATLAB package costs thousands of dollars. Every extra toolbox containing a few functions is almost another thousand dollars. And you have to buy it all again in a couple of years.

Why would you spend tens of thousands of dollars per year per person when the alternatives are free and perfectly capable of doing similar?

It’s also worth noting that MATLAB is an unholy nightmare to actually deploy to production systems, unless (you guessed it) you buy into their tens-of-thousands-of-dollars cloud tooling systems, which frankly are very inflexible.

I stuck with MATLAB for so long, and still believe the language is miles more powerful for scientific data analysis… but The MathWorks just shoot themselves in the foot over and again around making it possible to actually use.