Can you add a link from the quickstart guide: https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/users/explain/quick_start.html#the-explicit-and-the-implicit-interfaces

am also kinda thinking this could be merged into/replace that section, b/c I think the break down here is a bit better suited to a new to all this audience and the text here isn't particularly figure oriented.

Disclaimer: This PR is a quick writedown of the comparison/translation between the two styles. It has been bogged a long time that we have no proper description of it in the documentation, and I wanted to get this out of my head.

Can you add a link from the quickstart guide

The quickstart guide already has a link to the top of the API/interfaces page. IMHO this is good enough for now.

this could be merged into/replace that section,

I agree that the quickstart guide can be improved wrt to this topic. However, (i) IMHO the text I've written belongs fundamentally into the API/Interface page, The quickstart guide may reference and or replicate the translation.

The quickstart guide also mentions unmanaged figures, a topic Tom propsed above. IMHO this should be completely stripped from the quickstart guide and put here, because it's an advanced topic.

But this all is beyond my scope for this PR. I do not have the time to substantially rewrite the quickstart guide or the interface explanation. If you want, we can collect the ideas in an issue.

Something went wrong ... Please have a look at my logs.

It seems that the branch you are trying to backport to does not exist.

Discussed further improvements are tracked in #29282.