Old Macintosh hands have weathered this storm
All will be well.
The first text editors all used some sort of tagged text for rudimentary formatting - all hail WordPerfect's "Show Codes" mode! - and the editors on the personal computers running DOS and MacOS followed in the footsteps of previous editors from Wang and IBM. No doubt El Reg mates can supply many more exemplary predecessors.
MacOS featured TextEdit as its plaintext editor -- but in Classic MacOS, TextEdit retained the ability to render basic formatting and inline graphics, even if editing such documents was considered too complicated for a Desk Accessory utility. You could manually insert the requisite codes into a text document, and even add the graphics resources with ResEdit, and come up with a fancy formatted document that could be mistaken for a MacWord masterpiece... The text stream resembled nothing more than a plaintext ASCII file with embedded ANSI codes, plus references to graphics image resources, if any. The commercial word processor Nisus Writer supported this document format in a full-featured editor.
Of course, the application created all of this by weaving together the various application kits supported by the GUI environment. Molding it like fine pottery into an example app, living documentation of the intent of the app kit designers. A lovely tapestry of clay.
TextEdit on 21st Century macOS supports RTF or plain text modes. You can select either option as the default for new documents.
Never mind that NotePad on Windows probably loads every writing system humanity has ever dreamed of, plus language models for a reasonable subset of those still in use, even before it draws the first pixel.
Meditating upon such realities will only upset you. Have a pint, in the unit of measure you find most pleasing, and forget about such detail.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
