Does splitting a potentially monolithic application into several smaller ones help prevent bugs
Things are seldom that simple in reality.
Splitting up does definitely not help to prevent those bugs in the first place. It can sometimes help to find bugs faster. An application which consists of small, isolated components may allow more individual (kind of "unit"-) tests for those components, which can make it sometimes easier to spot the root cause of certain bugs, and so allow it to fix them faster.
However,
even an application which appears to be monolithic from the outside may consist of a lot unit-testable components inside, so unit testing is not necessarily harder for a monolithic app
as Ewan already mentioned, the interaction of several components introduce additional risks and bugs. And debugging an application system with complex interprocess communication can be significantly harder than debugging a single-process application
This depends also a lot on how well a larger app can split up into components, and how broad the interfaces between the components are, and how those interfaces are used.
In short, this is often a trade-off, and nothing where a "yes" or "no" answer is correct in general.
why do programs tend to be monolithic
Do they? Look around you, there are gazillions of Web apps in the world which don't look very monolithic to me, quite the opposite. There are also a lot of programs available which provide a plugin model (AFAIK even the Maya software you mentioned does).
would they not be easier to maintain
"Easier maintenance" here often comes from the fact that different parts of an application can be developed more easily by different teams, so better distributed workload, specialized teams with clearer focus, and on.
If the animation and modelling capabilities were split into their own separate application and developed separately, with files being passed between them, would they not be easier to maintain?
Don't mix easier to extend with easier to maintain a module -per se- isn't free of complications or dubious designs. Maya can be the hell on earth to maintain while its plugins are not. Or vice-versa.