> There is nothing inherently human readable about plain text. It's still unreadable bits, just like any other binary protocol. The benefits of plain text are the ubiquitous tools that allow us to interact with the format.

You seem to have glossed over my whole point about how the ubiquity of text is what drives good tooling for it, not the other way around. Text is not a technology created for computers. It has been a ubiquitous information protocol for millennia.

> I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. And if those tools are available, I prefer binary protocols for it's efficiency.

I'm not afraid of binary protocols either and there are good reasons to use them. The most common reason is that they can be purpose-built to support much greater information density. However, purpose-built protocols require purpose-built tools and are, by their very nature, limited in application. Therefore, purpose-built protocols will never be as well supported as general-purpose protocols like text.

That isn't to say that purpose-built protocols are never supported well enough to be preferable over text. Images, audio, video, databases, programs, and many other types of information are usually stored in well-supported, purpose-built, binary protocols.