SubplotManager is not standalone: bidirectional coupling with Figure

[cvanelteren]

Design follow-up from #698 / #677. Not a bug — the refactor is behaviour-preserving and the full suite is green. This is about whether the seam is where the plan says it is.

The manager sequencing in #677 positions SubplotManager as the leaf node: "SubplotManager: (standalone, only needs gridspec)". As extracted, it isn't standalone.

The dependency is bidirectional

SubplotManager reaches back into Figure for:

• fig._layout_dirty
• fig._format_signature
• fig.add_subplot(...)
• fig.format(...)
• a function-local from .figure import Figure (_subplots.py:256) needed to call super(Figure, fig).add_subplot(...) — a deferred import that exists purely to break an import cycle.

And Figure's collaborators now call back through the figure to reach the manager: gridspec.py and axes/base.py use fig._get_subplot / fig._iter_subplots.

There's also a round trip: SubplotManager.add_subplots calls fig.add_subplot(...) (the public, decorated method) rather than self.add_subplot(...), so every subplot goes manager → figure → manager just to pick up @_clear_border_cache.

Net: the code moved to a new file, but the coupling didn't shrink. That's fine as a first step — it just means the "standalone" edge in the #677 dependency graph isn't real yet, and the managers that are supposed to depend on this one will inherit the cycle.

Bonus: parse_proj doesn't belong here

SubplotManager.parse_proj never uses self except to call self.parse_backend(...), which is itself a @staticmethod. Projection parsing is a pure function of its arguments, and the class docstring already admits it's a third concern ("subplot creation, gridspec ownership, and projection parsing").

Making it a @staticmethod or a module-level function would be a strict simplification — and it also makes the fix for the ui.py signature coupling (filed separately) trivial.