Max and I chatted about this a while back as an idea for how to minimize some of the extra code required for NCL-like styling over in geocat-examples and/or a way to provide some customized styling for the modeling groups.
I think it's a really interesting idea and we might also find some other applications for it. That said, it's probably not a trivial lift and I suspect maintenance and testing could be challenging.
Relevant Matplotlib docs: https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/customizing.html#customizing-with-style-sheets