Most plugins today are not capable of maintaining relationships between patches and MIDI channels. Even the Calf fluidsynth player, while having this ability, is limited since everything goes out through a single pair of audio outs. So even in that case, you have a Piano assigned to MIDI channel 1, a bass on MIDI Channel 2, and a Airplane (yea, old school!) assigned to MIDI Channel 3.... now you can't mix those individually.
Essentially, the old "hardware" approach was abandoned some time ago and everyone just runs multiple instances of any given plugin. This was one of the things that blew my mind coming back into this after a 10+ year break.
Most plugins today are not capable of maintaining relationships between patches and MIDI channels. Even the Calf fluidsynth player, while having this ability, is limited since everything goes out through a single pair of audio outs. So even in that case, you have a Piano assigned to MIDI channel 1, a bass on MIDI Channel 2, and a Airplane (yea, old school!) assigned to MIDI Channel 3.... now you can't mix those individually.
Essentially, the old "hardware" approach was abandoned some time ago and everyone just runs multiple instances of any given plugin. This was one of the things that blew my mind coming back into this after a 10+ year break.