In the early days, even as I appreciated what Pandas could do, I never found its API sane. Pandas has too many special cases and foot-guns. It is a notorious case of poor design.
The problems of the Pandas API were not intrinsic nor unavoidable. They were poor design choices probably caused by short-term thinking or a lack of experience.
On eager vs lazy evaluation -- pytorch defaulting to eager seemed to be part of the reason it was popular. Adding optional lazy evaluation to improve performance later seems to have worked for them.
My opinion is hardly uncommon. If you read over https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/c3lr9n/am_i_th... you will find many in agreement. Of those who "like" Pandas, it is often only a relative comparison to something worse.
The problems of the Pandas API were not intrinsic nor unavoidable. They were poor design choices probably caused by short-term thinking or a lack of experience.
Polars is a tremendous improvement.