Yes, Julia and numpy have different semantics here. And yes, folks may have reasons to prefer one over the other. Whether one is more reasonable or useful than the other is indeed quite a matter of personal opinion.
Personally, I don’t think either semantic (list of lists nor linear indexing) is all that great. But, sure, both are useful in different situations. Heck, linear indexing is what you often end up doing with Julia’s eachindex (not that it necessarily needs to be that way, but it is that way right now, and it’s not going to change for quite some time).
(Moderator’s note: I know this came up earlier in the original thread, but this makes for a decent split point.)