Neither is not a good comparison. Using the [... for ... in ... if ...] syntax avoids creating temporaries for the unfiltered interim results, boolean indexing OTOH would require them. filter operates on existing iterators, the comprehension syntax creates iterators and collects them; a pretty common use case.
The point is not to avoid any kind of parallel solution — that neither desirable nor practical — but to have a small number of orthogonal building blocks that combine well. For this particular purpose, control flow already works very well.
On a somewhat related note, I admire how clean Julia is from a control flow perspective. Basic (non-coroutine) control flow has combounding (begin, ( ; )), two kinds of loops (for, while), branching and short-circuiting boolean ops, and the standard exception handling constructs. And that’s it! We can build the rest easily from these components. (Technically for is redundant once we have while, but it meshes so well with iteration that it is worth it).