Can you please read Getting good answers to your questions and share code and version numbers so we can talk in specifics.
You may be right that things aren’t working in your case; however, you are not demonstrating that whereas I have code and offerings that work below when using the ipympl documentation with my fully updated Chrome on Mac (Version 143.0.7499.170 (Official Build) (arm64)).
One thing to try is to make sure you do a hard refresh of your browser page. This is necessary as ipympl affects a lot of things and sometimes if things break you need a hard browser refresh to propagate all the changes. On a Mac in Chrome, it is 'SHIFT + COMMAND + R`. I suggest looking up what it is in your version of Windows.
If you want to share code here, see about ‘block code formatting’ here. (Or see about ‘fenced code blocks’ here. They are both the same thing if you look into the details.) You can also use code snippet sharing resources like GitHub’s gists.
Just because it worked without ipympl before doesn’t mean it should still. ipympl is the current way and has been for years now.
As the ipympl github repo says, " ipympl enables the interactive features of matplotlib in the Jupyter notebook and in JupyterLab."
I have posted about it here and on StackOverflow fairly often. I can point you to examples that work right now in environments where things work. See here for code that you can run using the environment you’ll get following instructions at the bottom of here to get a mybinder-served session that is on a remote machine without needing to login or touch your own machine. The code referenced in option #2 there. These both work in Chrome on a Mac updated fully, specifically Version 143.0.7499.170 (Official Build) (arm64) .
As here makes it clear, now %matplotlib widget is just using ipympl behind the scenes in modern Jupyter. I would encourage you though to be explicit and use %matplotlib ipympl as it makes clear to you and others what is necssary to use the feature. (Others have even reported sometimes %matplotlib ipympl works when %matplotlib widget does not. That shouldn’t be the case; however, fortunately, the more explicit approach is the one that works in those cases.)