The built-in png device does not render. The plot object is generated silently, which is the issue. This is the only direct plot support for base R and ggplot2 plots. I have many ggplots built in critical analyses that all require time-intensive workarounds until this issue is resolved.

Now displayHTML still works like before, but is so much less economical in code. Interactive plots and dashboards are a different use-case, and I also use these daily and understandably have to deploy them through JavaScript and html service.

That said, a work around for the current png device problem which requires retooling our notebooks is to wrap (base R plots / ggplots / dygraphs / plotly/ etc) in shiny apps. Clumsy, but still works. BTW, this has long been the case with plotly outputs - cannot be rendered directly in R notebooks like they can in python notebooks.

And in the very worst case, if we desperately need those plots, the other bandaid is R df → Spark df → temp view → pandas df → matplotlib. Ugh! I know.

But please DataBricks, restore our direct png renders