There is a particular kind of WordPress plugin that starts as one useful thing and ends as fourteen. Security grows an SEO tab. The SEO tab grows a redirect manager. The redirect manager grows a newsletter. By the time it is finished you cannot switch off the part you do not want, because it is all one plugin, and turning it off takes the part you do want with it.
Darkside is built the other way round. Every capability ships as its own plugin, with its own tables, its own option row, its own capabilities, and its own license. Security is a plugin. SEO Tools is a plugin. Redirects, Marketing, Forms, Invoices, Store, Rank, Translate and Darkroom are all plugins. You install the ones you need.
Nothing depends on anything that can be switched off
The rule that makes this work is that no plugin in the family reads another one’s data. Where a sibling is present, a plugin uses what that sibling already publishes rather than building it again. The store uses the page builder’s element filters for its storefront, the theme’s lightbox for a product gallery, SEO Tools for product titles and descriptions, and Marketing for a newsletter box at checkout.
Where the sibling is absent, the store still sells. That is the whole test. A shop is the part of a site that must not break, so nothing underneath it is allowed to be load bearing and optional at the same time.
What that buys you
Three things, and they are all boring in the best way.
Updates are per plugin. A fix to the redirect table does not ship you a new checkout. When something does go wrong, the surface area of the change is one plugin rather than the whole suite, which is the difference between a five minute rollback and an evening.
Deactivation is honest. Switching a plugin off removes its capabilities and leaves its tables alone, because an order history is a business record and deactivating a plugin is not a decision to destroy one. Scheduled jobs go with it, so a switched off plugin is not still firing at nothing every hour.
And you can buy one thing. If all you need is a redirect manager, you are not paying for a shop, and you are not carrying twelve features you will never open in the admin menu.
Fourteen plugins sounds like more to manage. In practice it is less, because each one only ever does the job it is named after.