Now that #12674 landed, my helper script has considerably shrinked and is now reduced to:

import matplotlib as mpl
from matplotlib.backends.backend_pgf import FigureCanvasPgf
mpl.backend_bases.register_backend('pdf', FigureCanvasPgf)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('pdf')

Could there be a way that using such a pdf style could do this backend registration? IIRC the biggest hurdle was that the backend must be registered before importing pyplot, but maybe things have (or could be) changed so that we could register the pgf backend for PDF output in matplotlibrc/style configuration files. The end goal for me is getting right of this helper and just have

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('pdf')

at the beginning of my notebooks. ;)

Thanks for consideration.