I guess that's more an issue with the courses than the language per se. Sometimes it is a good idea to begin the course with direct application, instead of focusing on the language.
I have encountered a lot of really terrible R learning materials. One data viz course I took (a very, very reputable and widely-used course on a major MOOC platform) taught how to make several simple chart types in each of base R, a library called lattice that I've never encountered since, and ggplot2. I think a lot of it comes from R instructors who started out back before the tidyverse trying to teach the path they _took_ to learning the language, rather than the quickest path to being proficient in the language as it exists today.
The tidyverse is incredibly controversial in parts of the R community; it's essentially an opinionated set of packages that basically comes with its own "standard" library. But I think that wholeheartedly embracing it, and hiding the way to do things in R that you would do them without the affordances that the tidyverse offers, is absolutely the right way to teach R these days. Unfortunately, a lot of courses and books haven't caught up to that yet.
The tidyverse is incredibly controversial in parts of the R community; it's essentially an opinionated set of packages that basically comes with its own "standard" library. But I think that wholeheartedly embracing it, and hiding the way to do things in R that you would do them without the affordances that the tidyverse offers, is absolutely the right way to teach R these days. Unfortunately, a lot of courses and books haven't caught up to that yet.