I am opposed to this change. Normally in software dev, having a lean core means the main distribution can be more smaller, faster and less surface area for attacks. My last foray into plugins led me to see that it is technically possible for plugin code to run even while “disabled” as this seemed to be up to the plugin author to check, so it does seem like this increases the risk & bloat significantly.
The most immediate issue is that no instructions seem to be updated on the install guide (perhaps I just missed them?) It’s not clear what we need to install to make things work again. I solved some errors by installing ubuntu package postgresql-16-pgvector but still had some vector errors running the db:migrate. I was able to work around them by locally deleting the ai plugin.
Anyway, this is a whole lot of extra code, many of these plugins are completely irrelevant to the use cases of most discourse communities. (This is not to say these are bad plugins! I am sure they are very useful to the communities that need them. Just I struggle to see that every community forum needs to ship with Zendesk integration, etc). The AI plugin in particular given its additional requirements that are breaking things should definitely get the boot IMO.
On a personal level, when I login to my admin panel and I suddenly see a bunch of ad plugins, even if the code should be inert, it makes me extremely concerned. I, in the strongest terms possible, wish to convey I do NOT want any big tech Ad plugins on my installs by default, even disabled. That is an industry that has historically been incredibly abusive towards user privacy and Discourse does not help itself by shipping such integrations by default. The people who want ads would have no trouble finding the requisite plugin, it’s not necessary to include it on all installs.
TLDR: Please reconsider this change. 