RFC: plotting in notebooks with show=False

Many times (most recently in #11513) users complain / get confused about plot behavior in Jupyter Notebooks, specifically the problem of figures getting "shown" too early and having empty subplot axes (typically when pre-generating a figure w/ subplots and looping over the subplot axes). Most of our plotting functions have a show=False option which will prevent the problem, but the parameter name is really confusing and I don't think it's very well documented how it should be used/interpreted in a notebook context.

One possible option would be to change the parameter to something like delay_plotting=True so that its name better reflects what is common to notebooks and interactive console sessions --- namely that the figure won't be shown immediately when it's created. Obviously, removing show will break a lot of user code, so I'd be inclined to retain show as a @legacy alias for the new param (and warn or error if both params are provided?)

I invite other suggestions of how to address this problem.

cross-ref to #11165 where a lot of related discussion can be found

cc @sam-s

Start by reading the related discussions in #11165 and #11513, then inspect the plotting functions that expose the show=False option. Done requires an agreed API and clear notebook behavior, including how any legacy alias or conflicting parameters should be handled.