Talk honestly about plugin overload. Don’t make it “plugins are bad”—explain when a plugin makes sense and when a custom solution is better.
There’s nothing wrong with using WordPress plugins. In fact, plugins are one of the reasons WordPress is so useful.
The problem starts when every new requirement gets the same solution:
“There must be a plugin for that.”
Need a popup? Install one.
Need custom fields? Install another.
Need a filter? Another one.
Need a little JavaScript functionality? There’s probably a plugin for that too.
Eventually, the website becomes a collection of plugins that were each installed for a good reason—but nobody really knows how they all affect each other.
We’ve seen this happen many times. The interesting part is that removing plugins isn’t always the answer either. Sometimes the right solution is simply replacing several small dependencies with one properly built feature.