Compared to what? What about the docker image? It’s effectively a development environment for math, and it’s seemingly robust. It doesn’t seem particularly wasteful in its use of dependencies specifically has the goal of interfacing with other open source tools. Rolling their own X for everything rather than using the de-facto third party libraries seems like a fine, manageable choice to me.
Is a pen not an alternative to a pencil? Different features and tradeoffs; it depends on preference and context. If anything it’s less of an alternative if there’s no differences, otherwise it would be byte-for-byte Mathematica and you’d be unable to choose between the two.
