It’s your opinion that this is a limitation of Plotly, because perhaps you think in terms of another plotting library.
Plotly has a logical architecture: a clear separation between trace and layout attributes.
When a figure represents subplots, then, as in mathematics, each subplot is referenced to a system of axes, and axes have a name to be distinguished.
It is much simpler to set the global attributes of the figure, like width, height, font_family, font size, and
local attributes specific to each subplot, as axis attributes, than naming each subplot and setting its properties by using its name.