Note that I can load the pyarrow in a vanilla python REPL just fine. If I ensure to import pyarrow before loading the R package then it works, however this is difficult to guarantee (other packages ...

On most systems both Python 2.x and 3.x are available as python and python3 respectively, but despite Python 2 being deprecated, reticulate will give it preference to Python 3.x. For example: > ...