Is gnuplot better for the use cases demonstrated on the page here?

I've always avoided gnuplot because it has looked pretty hard to get anything useful out of. But uplot looks much more approachable. Just piping some data to "uplot hist --nbins 20" is something I'll remember.

You just need a better frontend. A distribution of file sizes < 100kB in my home directory:

  ls -l                            \
  | awk '$5 < 100000 {print $5}'   \
  | feedgnuplot                    \
      --histo 0                    \
      --binwidth 5000              \
      --xlabel 'File size (bytes)' \
      --ylabel Frequency           \
      --terminal 'dumb 120 40'     \
      --unset grid

     45 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        |  *      *   +            +             +            +             +            +             +            |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     40 |-+*      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     35 |***      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     30 |-+*      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     25 |-+*      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     20 |-+*      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     15 |-+*      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
     10 |-+*      *                                                                                               +-|
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
        |  *      *                                                                                                 |
      5 |-+*      ********                                                                                        +-|
        |  *      *      *                                              ********                                    |
        |  *      *      ********     **********************     ********      *                                    |
        |  *      *   +  *      *  +  *      *   +  *      *******      *   +  *         +             +  ********  |
      0 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        0           10000        20000         30000        40000         50000        60000         70000        80000
                                                      File size (bytes)

Feedgnuplot is really slick.

https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot

It's in the debian repos too.