Because their lists don't have selection by bare words, they have to go one of several other specialized, distinct, built-in Abstract Data Types to get it. They have to create whole so-called "Classes" and "Modules", when all they really needed was a list whose elements can be accessed with a dot and a bare word.
The pandas package for tabular data manipulation requires even more complicated workarounds. It has a DataFrame Class composed of objects of Column Class. Then it makes an arbitrary bunch of common functions, so common that many are built into Python itself, Methods of said Columns. (In R, a table is just a list of vectors, and no Methods are needed.)
So now you've got a thing that's supposedly a real Class, but it's really just a container of completely arbitrary fields and data types. These fields are themselves instances of another Class that is supposedly specific to pandas, but is really just a vector, and a vector doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being part of a table. And that Class has some random methods that give you additional ways to do basic things the language already does, and are often not the functions you actually need to work with the data therein.
All that just so that we can write stuff like df.col.max(), and... gosh, what is that even supposed to mean? Can we all just admit that we like writing code in chains separated by dots, and stop tying that capability to hierarchies of Official Abstract Data Types?
These non-R languages make you utter such strange incantations just to put something in a key-value container and access that thing with nice-looking code. I feel like this makes it harder to realize that very often this is the best way of doing things.
R has a bit more varied and sometimes mildly ugly syntax than other languages, but once you get used to the building blocks it gives you, it has all these powers to do very dynamic things in very easy ways, without a bunch of ponderous specialized concepts.
The strange thing here seems to be R’s use of ”list” as a name for a map-like key-value structure. The word ”list” is commonly understood to refer to a data structure which needs to be linearly (linked list) or partially (skiplist) iterated through to access a value at a particular index.
Sql has “tuples” for the rows of a result-set which are neither tuples nor lists in the “general sense” and are of a “record” type - names with values.
So what is a list? Depends on the context.
My impression is that JavaScript is another language like R that values flexibility a lot.
And yeah, I agree that R is rather casual about lists vs maps. It doesn't really care that maps are a great data structure in their own right. It just wants to slap names on list elements when it's convenient to access elements of the list by name.