You may want to kick the tires on Scroll Tables. https://scroll.pub/blog/tables.html

We will eventually have great support for both of those.

Thanks Breck; I watched the video and it's appealing; I assume the downvote (now cancelled by my upvote) was the HN aversion to self-promotion, but as the OP I hereby declare this comment relevant and useful.

Came here to ask this exact question.

As I understand it, Observable Plot also seeks to be the "higher-level abstractions on top of D3" layer.

The Vega docs address Vega vs D3 (https://vega.github.io/vega/about/vega-and-d3/), but I don't see them compare Vega vs Observable Plot, which would seem to be a more apples-to-apples comparison.

As explained in the link, Vega uses many of the D3’s geometry and other utilities, but not the DOM manipulation that most people associate with D3.

So the layers are not even in this comparison - Vega is sort of on the same level as D3, and Vega Lite vs Observable Plot is a better comparison.

A little digging also yielded this, https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-vega-lite

But again it's not Vega vs Plot, it's Vega Lite vs Plot.