It's amazing how popular Robotics as become a regular topic in mainstream media. It is no longer science fiction. Autonomous cars are roaming the streets in SF and nobody bats an eye. Humanoid robots startups are floating like flies.
When I first started working with ROS back in 2018, I was just getting my feet wet in the world of mobile robotics. ROS has been around since 2011. Since then, RViz was the de facto 3D visualization tool, and rqt_plot was the go-to option for visualizing time series data from ROS topics. These tools were essential, if somewhat limited.