In my experience, Plotly is good for data exploration with the usual line plots, but forget about it when plotting surfaces, and goodbye to interactivity if you want to build some kind of GUI.
Makie is the way to go for all these things, and it is very, very fast. You can have data exploration if you code it manually, see for example: [Plots.jl] Can't show data on hover (surface plot) - #2 by sudete
I love Makie, but it is true that it needs to keep improving to be as polished as Gadfly for some things. However, this is good! There is still room for improvement.