Reporting back after some brief experience with Makie and a few other plotting packages:
Currently, it seems like Makie has some rough edges and suffers from some of the same multi-backend issues as Plots. For example, the Cairo backend is the only one which can output vector graphics, but it won’t open a display from the terminal and doesn’t have any interactivity. The GL backend won’t open inside the VSCode plot pane. The WGL backend needs extra setup for multiple figures. I do think Makie is the most powerful and has some of the best documentation, but it is still a little fiddly for my taste. If you are going to stick to one environment and focus on animations, then I think it will work well for you.
For my goals of simple, composable, and reliable, I am probably going to stick with Gadfly until the Makie experience is more streamlined. Gadfly will open a nice plot that can pan/zoom anywhere I run the code. It can output to multiple file formats, and there isn’t too much to configure. The documentation and GitHub Issues backlog could use some help, but it seems to do all the basics extraordinarily well.
Some people also recommend VegaLite, but using a macro to convert Julia to JSON doesn’t meet my idea of simple.
See some more comparisons here: