Plugins in DAWs are graphically complex, animate, and exhibit plenty of the issues described about DAWs themselves

Yes, but a DAW must do that dozens/hundreds of times more and is on screen for the entire lifetime of the program.

I stand by what I said: most plugins have nowhere near the complexity of a DAW. Some do! (Kontakt/Reakt, and so on) but the vast majority only have a small subset of what the DAW needs to display, and only need to do it for a limited number of channels, and only need to do it rarely.