Exactly, but it's undeniable that even updated it does have some ergonomics issues. It just that its users care less about developer ergonomics. Afaik, there were plenty of attempts to build a replacement (i. e. Fortress), didn't catch on.
Fortran is in a weird spot. It's incredible for writing the hardest parts of the programs it's used for, but it honestly sucks for doing the "boring" parts. Doing heavy vectorized workloads in Fortran is nice, but doing I/O, organizing code, using any data structure that isn't essentially an array of some sort, etc. all suck.
There is a reason Fortran has survived so long. Writing matrix/vector heavy code in Fortran is (imo) still more pleasant than C, even when accounting for the idiosyncracies around writing a Fortran program in general. The skill floor is significantly lower for writing very high-performance code.
In a way they would be better off using Fortran instead of Python.
Every scientific result that relies on a snapshot of 50 packages (whose resolution in conda is an NP-hard problem) should be qualified with an added hypothesis:
Given Python-3.x.y and [50 version numbers of packages], we arrive at the following result.
Even in Python itself the random number generator was broken for more than a year by one of the persons who actively mob people for rejecting their patches (in which they might have a monetary interest since they got paid for many of their patches, making it a gigantic conflict of interest).
This invalidated many scientific results from that period.
You are talking about people who still use Fortran… Scientists ain't got any time to migrate to another framework every week.