To be fair, matplotlib is pretty awful (the API, I mean). I think it might be the worst library I have ever worked with... Though perhaps I'm repressing some memories there.
The best plotting APIs I have seen are those from MATLAB and Mathematica. I have used Makie a few times, and it is very flexible and well designed.
I am hoping they provide a declarative API that emulates Gadfly more closely. Gadfly is great for simple statistics, sort of a Julia equivalent to ggplot2.
Matplotlib is heavily inspired by MATLAB's plotting, no? Its pyplot submodule is a wrapper around the base OO API which is an almost exact clone of matlab.
Matlab and Mathematica are awesome. Gadfly had a great API but suffered greatly from Julia's ttfp problem. Tried makie, looked good but that was around when I left Julia (just because other langs paid). VegaLite is pretty amazing.
