[WCSTombs]

Thanks for pointing that out, and sorry for being redundant. I skimmed the blog but missed that.

Overall, I agree with your larger point. I think this it's a natural progression and pretty analogous to assembly language leading to higher-level languages with a much better developer experience. In that case we went from fixed registers to developer-named variables, and now we can go from fixed numerically-indexed array axes to ones indexed by developer-chosen names.

[taliesinb]

No worries! Yes, exactly. It's also similar to doing arithmetic with and without units. Sure, you can do arithmetic without units, but when you are actually working with real-world quantities, but you easily get yourself into a muddle. Unit-carrying quantities and algebraic systems built on them prevent you from doing silly things, and in fact guide you to getting what you want.

[WCSTombs]

Yeah, I'm totally with you on the units, too. For me it's even more frustrating, because it's such an obvious and ubiquitous problem, and still relatively unacknowledged. There are third-party solutions (like Pint in Python), but in my experience by default scientific software projects tend to begin with just NumPy basically, and introducing more advanced (IMO) tools like Xarray and Pint is an uphill battle against ingrained habits.