Is this your experience of using python or reading about it? I don't know your background so I apologize for making some assumptions about the source of your confusion. It sounds like you don't have a ton of experience programming, so let me start with a broadly: Python is a language in sense that English is a language, but these "something else that runs on top of it", are more like specialized vocabulary or jargon than "languages on top of the language".
English gives you the grammar/structure/spelling to communicate; it's a foundation. But it also gives you general vocabulary; adjectives and adverbs blend and interact with any new vocabulary that might come into play. It doesn't matter if its a poem, or novel, or a technical documentation, or a text book, there is still a lot of English-ness to it.
In the same way, Python as a language is still the substrate that each of those tools (Tensorflow, or Pandas, or Django, or Flask) are interacted with. I agree with what you're getting at, that maybe the tools are more important than the language. When people talk about their like for python the could talk about either: the language itself or the culture/ecosystem around the language. Some inherent to the language, so a quirk of it's history.
This applies as much to natural language. You might hear someone love the sound of Spanish or French, or praise the regularity of Latin spelling, or love Greek for the wealth of ancient, influential texts that it gives access to.
In the case of python you get a lot of praise from both angles. People love the language for it's ecosystem, sure; but also for how it does white spacing, its brevity, the specifics of its typing, where it does and dosn't need parentheses, REPLability, etc.
But you haven't responded to the argument. If someone urges you to use Racket, and you have task in front of you (say, put up a website), it sort of matters whether Racket has a framework more than if it has brackets, indents or curly braces.
- Fidelity's "Minus Sign Mistake": loss of $1.3 billion - TransAlta "Clerical Error": loss of $24 million - Fannie Mae "Honest mistake": loss of $1.3 billion
Then you get employee turn over where new employees don't get "arcane" knowledge passed down by people who left and took their spreadsheet foo with them.
Excel does not have "access control", "auditing", "change tracking". Just getting work done is not enough.
That is like saying if I mistyped in a word doc, that word created the loss.