Yeah, I imagine this’d be the case. Especially since MATLAB is designed for heavyweight computation in engineering industries, not merely simple looping or graphs. I’ll be honest and say that I neither use MATLAB nor GNU Octave since my work does not require it; I was just recalling a particular story during my student days that I thought would be interesting to share. For such heavy, niche and always evolving set of toolboxes and libraries, we can reasonable expect no open-source alternative will be able to “replace” MATLAB in any meaningful sense, it’s just too powerful and big.
I’m mostly okay with that though. These sorts of work are done in institutions or industries that can and should be able to afford them. It’s the reason why I don’t reasonably expect GIMP to overthrow Photoshop or Kdenlive/Openshot/Shotcut to overthrow Premiere Pro, unless somehow massive funds are channeled to their development. Rare cases like Linux or Blender or Firefox do happen, but they have massive backings.