Yes, if possible someday, it would be very good to have a single “disable all plugins” boolean in the admin settings, which works without any container rebuilding. However, not being a Discourse developer (having only a year of node.js, vuejs app development), my instincts tell me this is not an easy change and would be a very big change to the architecture.
Our legacy LAMP forum had this feature and we cannot count the times we used this boolean to quickly trap an error as related to plugins. However, the software architecture is so different, it’s not even useful to compare.
I’m personally confident the Discourse Team will come up with something. Lot’s of users are addicted to plugins and there will be more dragons over time.
Thanks for looking into this.