The problem with all these nice new visualization libraries for Python, is that they all (at least the shinny nice ones) fail totally short when it comes to do B&W graphics for journal publications. Things like filling patterns, line patterns etc, are mostly missing.
I still use Matplotlib and I can make it look beautiful and exactly how I want... it's just a lot more work to get the shinny bits.
For my thesis, I tried a couple of different options, but in the end the only one that really made publication-grade output was gnuplot with the epslatex terminal. It's a bit fiddly to get it up and running, but hands down the best result I think.
The underlying vega library supports overriding styles for color and line properties - it may not be as difficult as you imagine to generate B&W graph outputs for print.
I save the data from python or matlab and use pgfplots to create stunning plots. Nothing I saw in any other plotting lib came ever close to pgfplots in terms of beauty and flexibility.
second that. also for the scientific community at large, big portions of "not-so-happy"-matplotlib-users are just using whatever they/their admin installed sometime ago, which probably is outdated and does not include a bunch of features introduced in v3
I still use Matplotlib and I can make it look beautiful and exactly how I want... it's just a lot more work to get the shinny bits.