This is a related question to Plot.show() in Quarto notebook after if statement is not showing - #4 by vlad.savelyev - responded there! Basically you are correct, the Jupyter’s built-in display is needed to be called, as show only outputs HTML, but it can’t tell Jupyter to display things.
Updated the documentation to make it more clear: Document use of display to show plots in notebooks by vladsavelyev · Pull Request #2938 · MultiQC/MultiQC · GitHub