R, RStudio, and Shiny are great for prototyping, but you'd regret building a production data science ecosystem around them. Better to start with Python and rely on JavaScript viz tools in the end.
I agree completely. We made a dashboard in Shiny which was initially really quick and easy to make, but now several years later I've spent so many hours cursing the thing. All new dashboards are now made in python.
In addition to being a language that does almost nothing to encourage good development practices and discourage bad ones, compared to Python the R ecosystem's tooling is just so inferior in every area: IDE, unit/functional testing, ETL, deployment, dependency management, etc. etc.