This is a design decision made by each plugin author. IMHO, the right answer is for each plugin to report statuses (running, connected to cloud service, authenticated, stopped, failed, etc.) that are common across most plugins and have this displayed and managed in the Admin Console, e.g. under the Plugins menu. Unfortunately this require a rework of the Plugin interface - preferably by ripping out the old Node Server REST API layer and linking the plugins directly to IoX via MQTT (a layer that already exists).
The nodes are supposed to represent devices.