Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just removing the function. If it was just removing one line of code, we'd likely done that already 😄.

There's code that generates the docstring.

It's used here in the docs https://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_summary.html#matplotlib.pyplot.plotting, which is partly redundant with https://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.html#module-matplotlib.pyplot. This mess has to be cleaned up along the way.

Steps to do (I haven't looked into the details so I might be wrong somewhere. Please check yourself that this makes sense):

• Check both docs and verify that the latter is equivalent to the former, so that we can drop the function listing exposed via the plotting() docstring.
• Replace the former by the latter. Ideally, the colors stuff should be moved somewhere else. IMHO it does not belong into the pyplot module docstring. It may also be redundant, but t.b.c.
• Remove plotting() and the code that populates its docstring.

#16181 was merged without plt.plotting() being removed. Combined with this PR being dormant for over 2 years I am going to close this PR.

Thank you for your work even if we did not merge it @SidharthBansal and I hope we hear from you again!

pyplot.plotting was removed in #22669.