Answer by Donshel for Aligning rotated xticklabels with their respective xticks

I am clearly late but there is an official example which uses

plt.setp(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=45, ha="right", rotation_mode="anchor")

to rotate the labels while keeping them correctly aligned with the ticks, which is both clean and easy.

See: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/images_contours_and_fields/image_annotated_heatmap.html