I think it's the opposite. If you give up on plain text, you forfeit a gigantic number of existing tools (git, grep, editors with their plugins, sed, etc.) and

I think it's the opposite. If you give up on plain text, you forfeit a gigantic number of existing tools (git, grep, editors with their plugins, sed, etc.) and have to redo all of them from scratch. The big issues with making a new language in 2021 are more related to semantic tools, like a LSP server (in which parsing is just the first building block). Just like wiring a compiler is much more than just parsing.