In part, the severity of the concern at the time was caused by the account l0k1 who was writing about the immanent death of Steemd due to increasing RAM storage requirements that will eventually cause the program to shutdown.

for many witnesses a full node used to take under 100g of RAM on a server, and now without setting up unique configurations take over 100G of RAM.

You guys are talking about 100GB of RAM? That's a lot...

If you are paying attention on what changes are being made to the platform infrastructure you might notice that there are upcomming new features that will allow migration of the plugins functionality to services external to steemd. For steem powered service providers it would be a great improvement. It would not only let you use specialized data backends to deal with whatever functionality you need (graphs? sql? full text searches?) but also, in future if there were a similar bug, then only a specified service and a subset of frontend functionality would be affected until it's fixed and there would be no need to touch steemd. This is a great upcoming improvement overall.

Plugins like what? Even side-chains?