I think maybe once in the past 6yrs I’ve had an issue with `brew install R` and I’m a power R user (upgrade regularly).

How we were you attempting to install? Build from source?

Installing R through conda is a PITA esp. for packages that aren’t in conda-forge yet, I’ll give you that.

Installing through homebrew or using the R project builds is very smooth in my experience

I‘ve had few problems with R on my 2020 13’ Macbook but several of my coworkers have struggled with R on theirs. Some of them are very new to programming and likely get stumped by what I would consider “simple“ bugs.

Installing even common packages like data.table require mucking around with R's makevars. There's no common set of variables that "just work", since different packages need different compilers to install.

This is only true if you insist on installing with OpenMP support.

I can think of maybe 3-5 packages, most relatively low use, that have intricacies required to install.