Author of the post. I agree that it is our biggest strength & weakness, I acknowledge that problem and put forward some solutions in the doc.
One piece of the solution is to embrace core and a bunch of important plugins together as the foundation. Normal users shouldn't be asked to pick & choose the basics like that, and we want to lock down the combination of the versions in that group. Whether those are behind the scene plugins or not from contributors' perspective is an implementation detail.
Another piece of the solution is to grow more extensibility mechanism beyond the current in-process plugin. There's a thing called "Pipeline shared libraries" in Jenkins, which is a good example of this. It lets developers create higher level pipeline primitives by composing other existing ones. There's some mechanism to share those with the community, too, although not as sophisticated as plugins. From users' perspective, it extends capabilities of Jenkins just like plugins, but in a way that doesn't create the kind of instability a bad plugin can -- its impact is local to one build, for example.
Then there's the container-as-a-building-block extensibility, Jenkins Evergreen, and more...
One piece of the solution is to embrace core and a bunch of important plugins together as the foundation. Normal users shouldn't be asked to pick & choose the basics like that, and we want to lock down the combination of the versions in that group. Whether those are behind the scene plugins or not from contributors' perspective is an implementation detail.
Another piece of the solution is to grow more extensibility mechanism beyond the current in-process plugin. There's a thing called "Pipeline shared libraries" in Jenkins, which is a good example of this. It lets developers create higher level pipeline primitives by composing other existing ones. There's some mechanism to share those with the community, too, although not as sophisticated as plugins. From users' perspective, it extends capabilities of Jenkins just like plugins, but in a way that doesn't create the kind of instability a bad plugin can -- its impact is local to one build, for example.
Then there's the container-as-a-building-block extensibility, Jenkins Evergreen, and more...