I have an unpopular opinion: matplotlib sucks, but it's going to be really hard to improve on it.
I don't think I need to give anyone reasons why it sucks, but the reason it's going to be hard to replace is that it can do so much. You can make other plotting libraries that are way easier to do a small subset of things with, but as soon as you want strange, lower level, customizable things, you start having to build in little hacks and workarounds. If you have enough of these, you'll eventually get mpl.
I don't think I need to give anyone reasons why it sucks, but the reason it's going to be hard to replace is that it can do so much. You can make other plotting libraries that are way easier to do a small subset of things with, but as soon as you want strange, lower level, customizable things, you start having to build in little hacks and workarounds. If you have enough of these, you'll eventually get mpl.