I never thought matplotlib would be so exciting. It’s always been one of those things that is… just there, and you take it for granted.

There hasn't been this much drama since "jet" was replaced as a color scheme!

There's "excitement" all over the SciPy stack. It just usually doesn't bubble up to a place where users would notice (even highly engaged users who might look at GitHub). Look up Franz Király (and his involvement/interactions with NumFOCUS) for one major example. It even bleeds into core Python development (via modules like `decimal`).