Well, the thing about establishing a plugin interface is that it facilitates 3rd party work on the platform by decoupling core development and its build processes from the development of any additional feature which can be done in whatever tech stack or manner the plugin developer wants.

When it comes to moderation tooling I'm honestly a little confused that there isn't more work or noise around a developing a sideloaded tool. With the current lemmy APIs for instance, surely one could make a web app, for admins/moderators only, that consumed feeds, exposed the admin/moderator powers and then added whatever additional information or views, filters, notifications or aggregations that moderators want in whatever UI that works better for moderators. Any ML/AI could also be added, with resultant metadata (or any other data for that matter) stored in a separate database. I'm probably missing something here, but I'm honestly a little confused.