I think matplotlib's overwhelming API surface motivates a lot of work in the plotting space. I personally find that I need to relearn/recopy the API every time I need to use it, and I could never whip something up on a whim.

I actually use youplot[1] for this very reason so I can pipe small datasets into an exploratory visualization straight from the command line.

[1]https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot