Three points

The plugin repositories algorithm is broken, there are many great plugins but you’ll never find them. Instead you get big plugins owned by agencies trying to upsell (with huge marketing g budgets. This should be fixed first
The keep it simple approach is the right one but it is applied inconsistently. Gutenberg is bloated and getting more bloated. Yet other areas get no love
Wordpress actually needs better apis. But there has been zero work in this direction since Gutenberg.

Canonical plugins are great in theory but would not really be needed if the core team just prioritised plugin developers