I'm far from a computer scientist, and used to be a fan of "Do What I Mean" (DWIM) magic like automatic elementwise broadcasting. But have come to highly favour consistency and predictability over that with experience.
I've certainly had moments where I've gone "just do that elementwise already, it's obvious!" and been mildly annoyed, but I'll take that any day over silent misbehaviour, hard to detect bugs, and being unable to tell at a glance what exact operations are going on in a line of code.
But I I would argue that for mathematical operations doing elementwise by default is much more consistent than doing matrix multiplication everywhere. Now the multiplication operator works differently (and importantly changes the shape of your result) based on what your arguments are. While elementwise behaves essentially like it was scalars everywhere. But the worst part of the elementwise operator is that they followed matlab and chose the freaking dot, the most easy to overlook character they could find.
The issue is that missing the dot often does not result in errors but in bugs where somehow the code is not giving sensible results. Back in the days when I was still teaching matlab to students, the main source of bugs were missing dots which were always painful to find.
I've certainly had moments where I've gone "just do that elementwise already, it's obvious!" and been mildly annoyed, but I'll take that any day over silent misbehaviour, hard to detect bugs, and being unable to tell at a glance what exact operations are going on in a line of code.