If they are right, it may make Wolfram more money, but it certainly makes Mathematica less successful.
I would think that Wolfram isn't trying to compete in the data science space, but more in the more abstract academic space.
Jupyter creator said (IIRC) that he was in fact inspired by Mathematica's interface, but it's not like Lisp, Smalltalk and APL weren't doing this at least a decade before.
Aside from this superficial similarity, Mathematica the language is a whole different... language. Imperative contructs are awkward to use and frowned upon, symbolic computation over expression trees is the default and very common, loops and with their exit conditons are expressed as either map-reduce style functions or recursive relations with multiple definitions. All code is literally just a tree of symbols that you can inspect and manipulate, you can enter "NonsenseFunction[1,2,3,4,5]+12" and the interpreter would just give it back to you unchanged, the execution model is simply implementing a rule-rewriting engine, if it can't find a rule to simplify an expression it simply returns the thing as is. This is very different from python or really any mainstream language, it's a fun mixture of Lisp and Prolog.
But the set of libraries for it will never compete with those of an open language.
wxMaxima is the most popular frontend for the software: http://wxmaxima-developers.github.io/wxmaxima/
I'm also taking the opportunity include a video that I made using to demonstrate my UI for it: https://peertube.functional.cafe/w/qnx1onPEx9LCtDP3wFqjWz
And yes, I think it is lacking a better UI (wxMaxima works but needs more polish I think) and particularly more appealing documentation. Your video is very interesting!