PR Summary

Closes#7742

This is the third attempt at solving#7742. The first two attempts,#8210 and#18771, made use ofignore_existing_data_limits, but this attribute will be deprecated as discussed in#17106.

The difficulty with date-like data is the hard-code default limits of (2000, 2010). So, this approach modifiesset_default_intervals to use the actual data instead of these hard-coded values when appropriate.

PR Checklist

• Has pytest style unit tests (andpytest passes).
• IsFlake 8 compliant (runflake8 on changed files to check).
• New features are documented, with examples if plot related.
• Documentation is sphinx and numpydoc compliant (the docs shouldbuild without error).
• Conforms to Matplotlib style conventions (installflake8-docstrings and runflake8 --docstring-convention=all).
• New features have an entry indoc/users/next_whats_new/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).
• API changes documented indoc/api/next_api_changes/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).