I agree with you.

Not just because tidyverse is "easier" but also because it teaches the right mental constructs to think about data.

I think beginners should spend a lot of time just thinking about normalization (Normal form and all that good stuff), and tidyverse directly encourages that.

There are some interviewers who want to test people's knowledge in the base language (particularly with Javascript), and I haven't understood that since you'll constantly be learning new libraries. It would be better to throw people an entirely new library and ask them to figure out how to use it.