I wonder how much Julia could be helped with some uneval/image-saving magic. So when you run the repl you instead get a pre-built binary with plot already loaded and several common specialisations already compiled.
The downside is that generating system images can be quite slow, so we're still working on ways to generate them incrementally. In any case, if you're inspired to work on this kind of stuff, it's definitely something the entire community is interested in!
That however means that some packages get a preferred status in the Julia ecosystem.