For doing "more with less" in graphics, I would rather learn a unique syntax for a package that is based on the grammar of graphics (ggplot2) than use a package with standard syntax and some other foundation.

Good you find value in that framework, but it doesn’t seem like a useful starting point for first time R learners interested in plotting and exploring their data. I have a colleague that integrates ggplot2 and other tidyverse packages into their undergraduate classes and they struggle quite a bit with creating basic plots since they now have to learn two things instead of one.