It depends on what you mean by 'production'. I've had great success setting up my data collection, engineering and predictions in batch processes. I agree though, I would never try to use R with a REST API, but I don't think it was ever designed for that.
As a general rule of thumb, if something needs real time predictions or I need deep learning libraries, I use Python. R is for anything else.
Exactly, production and deployment process are very different. In enterprise it is very rigid with production that has no internet connection and the best if you do not install pkgs there (supported by rsuite).
But I had a customer who treated dev as prod. :)
As a general rule of thumb, if something needs real time predictions or I need deep learning libraries, I use Python. R is for anything else.