It's not neovim, but the surrounding plugin architecture I need. I'm using coc.nvim to get autocompletions and documentation and I find that to be increasingly brittle. Also the python3 provider stuff randomly breaks in a venv sometime.

Huh, sorry to hear that. Personally the only annoyance I've had with coc.nvim was when they changed how autocomplete worked and I had to update my keybindings, but that wasn't particularly bad.

Ubuntu 22.04.

I'm guessing the few dozens of plugins are probably messed up in a way or another after each updates.

Apparently, there's no unified QA testing among community supported ecosystem with 20 different authors.

In packer, at least, you can pin plug-in versions. I’ve never had the issue you describe - I suspect precisely because I keep my plugin count lean and pin each dependency so it’s always deterministic.