I recently started using Holoviews/Hvplot/Geoviews/Datashader for some big-ish data viz, and it's been mostly positive, but with some notable annoyances. The performance on big data is excellent. But I spent maybe two hours trying to figure out how to draw a damn regression line over my plot and I couldn't. Also hv.extension() seemed to break plain Matplotlib, whenever I tried to generate a plot after calling that function, I got an error about a non-interactive backend when trying to view a plot interactively, even when I selected an interactive backend explicitly.
Having some level of abstraction on top of matplotlib is necessary if you don’t want to spend time tweaking every little thing.