Almost all of my tinkering is “download this thing, cache it (because it’s huge), run a program or a series of programs on it, and package the output up somewhere.” When I’m writing the thing that does the work I’m not tinkering any more..

Not really?

I've been places, from embedded bare metal to ML AI, and that "embedded bare metal" end is the one place I don't use Python directly in. Embedded bare metal is just ruled by C forever.

Bit of a shame, because C is kind of bad at its job, but nothing else has the "compatible with everything" badge of honor.

The tooling around embedded devices though? Python.