WHAT EVENTUALLY HAPPENED TO THE RUINED PLANTATIONS?

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I think some former slave-owners offered former slaves a chance to sharecrop, since they couldn't afford to pay cash for people to work the land.

Some as you say, remained. Actually, some of the more famous burned out plantations were destroyed by accidental fires before or after the war, such as Windsor Plantation, which appears in Raintree County. Others were probably torn down as safety hazards.

Some of the houses that were left standing were abandoned and fell into dilapidation before bing demolished. Lucky planters managed to sell off the land, but retain the house as a private residence. Most ended up selling, I think, and the homes were sometimes converted into public buildings like schools, or businesses like hotels or bed and breakfasts.

Others still became vacation homes and hunting lodges for wealthy Northerners, who, ironically, romanticized the Old South more than any Southerner. Clare Boothe Luce, for example, the New York society dilettante and playwright of The Women, bought a South Carolina plantation house as a retreat. In Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family, there's an amusing anecdote from an African American descendent of slaves about Luce liking to have the local black people gather around the back porch and serenade her with plantation songs...a request they seemed to find a bit quirky and odd.

We still have some standing plantation homes here in Tennessee.
There are a few in Franklin, which you may or may not know, was the place of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
John Overton's home is still standing and open for tours, as is President Andrew Jackson's home (The Hermitage).
I have toured all these. And although there has been some restoration over the years, these have been kept as close to their original state as possible.
Some of these even have original slave quarters too, complete with artifacts found buried around.
If you are a history buff like me, these tours are so cool.

Most plantation houses weren't special or noteworthy places. They were more like large farmhouses with a fancy front porch attached. Only the wealthiest of the planters would have built more impressive houses.

When the war ended, most plantation houses were still standing. Even during the infamous march to the sea, the excesses of Sherman's army is somewhat exaggerated, they tended not to burn houses that were still occupied by the family, but a house left empty was at risk and could be torched. What they did burn were cotton gins, barns filled with the harvest and cotton.

The war, as you know, destroyed the plantation model. The south shifted to the sharecropping model that did prolong the plantations but then the arrival of the boll weevil in the later 19th century, coupled with severe erosion in many parts of the South, brought it all to an end.

The planter class, as the better educated segment of society, often sent their children to school and universities by the 1930s the descendants of the planters often still owned their families' old plantations, but only for the land, which would be rented out on sharecropping basis while the owners lived in town or cities and worked in business or the professions. The big houses were either abandoned or rented out and many fell into decay and eventually collapsed or were demolished. But many still remained.

It is sad that a lot of plantation houses were left to fall apart. I'm glad that some plantation houses were turned into museums. Some people were able to afford to keep their plantation houses after the Civil War and use sharecropping to make money to keep the plantations going. A lot of people probably could not afford to keep their plantations after the Civil War ended and abandoned the plantations. A lot of plantation houses were eventually abandoned anyway after World War 1 and after World War 2 when many of the sharecroppers were able to find better jobs in factories in big cities. Without enough people to work in the fields, the owners of the land and houses would not be able to afford to keep their plantations. I wish that more of the plantation houses could have been restored and turned into museums for people to visit to learn about the past and to look at the nice houses.

I descend from a planter family in Georgia; the plantation was located not far from where Tara was imagined to be. After the war, the land was subdivided among the surviving members of the family, most of whom began to engage in dairy farming, a much less labor-intensive pursuit. Our own farm continued on as a dairy farm until 1926 (the death of my great-grandmother).
The house was finally pulled down in the 1950's, but the Magnolias that framed the front entrance are still there. There are thousands of Daffodils on the property as well, propagated from their Antebellum ancestors.