Problem
R cannot detect the presence of "Rprofile.site" file in home directory's /etc folder despite it being there.
Investigation
Since the Rprofile.site lives in the home directory as /etc/Rprofile.site. I checked the home directory using R.home(component="home")
and got "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources"
. Then I created an Rprofile.site in RStudio and put it in the folder. I restarted RStudio but it still wouldn't automatically load the file.
From Efficient R Programming: https://csgillespie.github.io/efficientR/3-3-r-startup.html I tried the following:
site_path = R.home(component = "home")
fname = file.path(site_path, "etc", "Rprofile.site")
file.exists(fname)
but it yielded False despite the file being in the directory.
I made sure to add an extra line, per yi hui's post: https://yihui.name/en/2018/04/rprofile-trailing-newline/ but it still did not work.
In addition, I followed the recommendation of numerous other SO and RStudio threads to no avail.
References
Getting .Rprofile to Load at Startup
https://community.rstudio.com/t/create-rprofile-automatically-when-creating-new-project/3719
Solution
I right clicked the Rprofile.site file and deleted the .R that still hung on to the actual file. Despite renaming it in Finder, the .R extension was still there and thus was not recognized by R.