I concluded ages ago that no substantial applications should be integrated into an operating system. Dynamic linking if you're building something portable is just an awful idea because of how much variety you'll inevitably have to support (or choose not to support).

Some people have written about AppImages, this also applies to FlatPak and similar techs too. Isolating anything more complicated than a command line tool is the way forward and the tech exists. Not using isolation this way is a recipe for pain, whether it be on the desktop or the server (or the phone).

It depends how the plugins are loaded - it'd be great if they could use sockets so that AppImages were viable. No idea myself, though.