This is definitely something we have been thinking about for some time under the staff-experience umbrella, I am tech lead on this team working alongside @tobiaseigen as PM.
It’s especially something we want for the AI plugin, which has a lot of settings. We are gradually updating plugins with custom UIs to follow our new UI guidelines, which puts the Settings tab within the plugin configuration area for easier access as a first step:
We are also starting to roll out the concept of what we are calling “config areas” to the admin UI, which will group site settings and other configuration in one place to reduce the need to hunt around in the giant /admin/site_settings list.
A good example of this is our new About config area:
You can see how everything is grouped into logical cards, and most of the inputs on this page are site settings in the background. We will also have a way to reset these settings individually to default as we do on the existing settings page, and the staff action logs are still created in the background.
This is a lot of words to say – we agree with the premise of the OP, we will get to it eventually, however we are choosing to focus more on these config areas and getting plugin UIs consistent for now.
I will ask though, which plugins do you think needs this type of setting grouping the most (apart from AI)?