For anything under the "analysis of data" heading, a REPL borders on essential. So many of my quick scripts are ideas I have that involve taking some freely available data and turning it into something else. Some of the steps in this process can take minutes (rarely, hours). You don't necessarily want to save every intermediate product of your work, and you don't want to have to rerun the program from the top every time you change a line. REPLs solve this problem in a way that is really great to work with.
They also solve the problem of needing to hold the standard library in your head. When I'm working in Python, and I can't remember if the method to check whether a string has a particular prefix is `beginswith` or `startswith`, if I'm working in a REPL it's just a tab-complete away. In a language without a REPL, the solutions are "look it up online", "try both and see what works", and "you are using an IDE, right? RIGHT?"
I have not written a single python script since I learned Go in 2015. But I still prefer Java for work. Dealing with databases is just completely asinine in Go.
Well unless it's just a quick script, in which case Python will do just fine.
Tried Scala while learning Chisel and hate it from the bottom of my heart. It's like Kotlin on bad drugs.
My point is, people are different.