For Linux folks: Notepad is the Windows equivalent of a console editor such as Pico or Vi.

Its job is to be robust, simple, and always available.

It's supposed to show you the symbols in markdown, not render them.

It is useful for opening potentially dangerous content in a 100% safe way, because "txt" should always be safe to inspect!

It is regularly used to open gigabyte-sized log files and the like, which it has to handle on machines with less free memory than that! Markdown rendering and similar features are fundamentally incompatible with this requirement because they require serialised parsing of the entire file instead of opening just tens of kilobytes at a time using memory mapping or whatever.

Notepad is also used to open files without taking a lock, allowing users to read files that are actively being written to. Again, incompatible with practically all parsing strategies.

The "new Notepad" is some dumbass executives pet project that overlaps with Visual Studio Code and is a shitty alternative to WordPad, which another dumbass executive axed for no good reason.