From what I’ve seen, there isn’t a perfect solution yet.
You an use Android Edge-to-Edge Support Plugin for Capacitor - Capawesome to completely disable Edge-to-Edge.
Or in the Capacitor config, set android.adjustMarginsForEdgeToEdge to disable.
In our app, we were allowing the webview to overlap the status bar prior to the Edge-to-Edge feature so the solutions above didn’t work for us.
We are currently using the Safe Area plugin you mentioned so we can maintain the status bar overlay and support edge-to-edge for the nav bar. It’s not perfect but it works for us for now until better support comes. You probably saw the issue linked in the plugin here - [Feature]: natively support and document safe area insets · Issue #8121 · ionic-team/capacitor · GitHub.
Some people have posted custom configurations. See Edge to edge Android and the other related forum posts that show there.