Yeah, that’s understandable. In part, this is because R is not a general purpose language. A lot of best practices for coding and data science can mostly be ignored, so you end up being very productive without learning them. If you’re using the same sets of tools for a bunch of different analyses, it’s fine to have everything installed globally. I think if you just treat julia like R and only work in the default environment, you should have a similar experience.
But Julia docs and people offering help are definitely likely to push you to use projects. Ultimately, it’s easy better for reproducibility, but it is for sure an extra thing to learn.