This is a presentation problem, or possibly a lack of tooling problem.
A binary format with a tool that renders it to text works the same as a text format; if the rendering is lossless, you could even consume the text format rather than the binary.
A "text" format is built to be understandable, but that's not a requirement; you could write a text format that isn't descriptive, and you'd have just as much trouble understanding what 'A' means as you would understanding what 'C0' means for a binary format.
Undocumented formats are a pain, whether they're in text or binary.
> or possibly a lack of tooling problem.
It's a lack of tooling problem. Because if you're a bioinformatics researcher, you want to devote your time, money and energy towards bioinformatics. You don't want to spend weeks getting tooling written to handle an arcane file format, nor pay for that tooling, nor hire a "brilliant" programmer. That tooling needs to be written, packaged and maintained for perhaps dozens of programming languages.
Instead, you want to use the format that can be read and written by a rank novice with a single programming course under their belt, because that's what makes the field approachable by dewey-eyed undergrads eager to get their feet wet. Giving those folks an easy on-ramp is how you grow the field.
And then you want to compress that format with bog-standard compression algorithms, and you might get side-tracked investigating how to improve that process without exploding your bioinformatics-focused codebase. Which is an interesting show of curiosity, not a reason to insult a class of scientists.
There's also a distribution problem. When people break history, by introducing new file formats, or updating old file formats, that impedes archival and replication. And once you've got a handful of file formats, now you've got the classic n+1 problem where no single format is optimal in all ways so people are always inventing new formats to see what sticks. And now an archivist needs to maintain tooling with an ever-increasing overhead. Here we see a clash of wisdom versus intellect, and if you're trying to foster a healthy field of research, wisdom wins the long game.