It would be GREAT if we could use the new replacement library *all*over*
TeX Live and finally eradicate poppler from TL. One of the sources of my
nightmares it is this poppler.
I think that it's better to keep poppler in texlive for the next 2019; pplib in luatex seems to be faster than poppler, and the size of the binary is smaller, but we still have some issues with some pdf and I have not checked it on all platforms . It's better to test it only in luatex for now, but yes ,as poppler replacement for texlive it makes sense.