My two cents, coming from someone who primarily uses pandas, is that it’s definitely worth learning polars.
I see them as complementary right now. Polars for the consistent API and speed and pandas for the sheer breadth of capabilities and updating legacy code.
are there any drawbacks?
Main drawback I’m aware of would be that polars doesn’t have all the functionality that pandas does. Compatibility is another one, but it’s less of a problem now since you can call from_pandas() and to_pandas() to switch back and forth between polars and pandas.