WordPress is an excellent system for a whole lot of different projects and needs. It’s widely used, fast, and flexible. However it does show its age in many ways. One of the areas where things could be a lot better and simpler is the WordPress plugin development.
WordPress plugins are still non-trivial to develop. This is mostly because WordPress is behind the current technology in many ways: new features of PHP programming language, such as Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), namespaces, dependency management with composer, unit testing, etc. There are good reasons for this, but those don’t help WordPress plugin developers.
What does help is, for example, this WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, which is a standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress plugins. Using it still requires a bit of effort and dumb find-replace changes. But it saves a tonne of time, as well as trial and error, especially for those people who are working on their first or second WordPress plugin.