For exaple, we have the platform and it has icons on the sidebar for Notebook, Object Storage, etc.
Every single one of these is a separate application and a separate repository. These applications are independent in how they deal with business logic, so there's no loss of expressiveness. They just must present certain "receptors" or interface if they want to be plugged into the system. The "interface" is a big word, and someone can produce a valid minimal plugin (that does nothing except be loaded) in two minutes.
This allows us to contain details of a plugin to the plugin itself, and not having it leak to other parts of the product. If we want to activate/de-activate the plugin, it takes less than 10 seconds manually.
Now, sometimes a plugin depends on another plugin. But they make their requests to that plugin, and fall-back to something else in case that plugin is unavailable.
The amount of engineering time this has saved us is delightful. I think of all the code we did not have to write and it makes me smile.
That's for containment and encapsulation at the application level. But we also follow that mode at the functionality level, too. For example, model detection and tracking is done by plugins.
We like to do things and have an abstraction so that we can churn out functionality for similar things "industrially", without thinking too much, but also so we could remove things easily without breaking the rest. Making code not just easy to add, but easy to remove is important. When we did that, we were able to remove a lot of code, too.
It is a spectrum, and we started by using it to contain at the "app" level.
