"Active development"? What the fuck do they think needed to be done with txt? More ads?
They do realize that there are a lot of txt looker aters right? This is not even a fight, its a "well anyway" sort of thing.
Wordpad is for whatever people use it for, and that is mostly looking at files in some sort of text (words on a pad). My point is if microsoft removes the ability to open a text file then the consequences are on them.
Or, and hear me out on this, you create an unholy mixture of MD/HTML/Latex documents in a plaintext editor and then you use the Pandoc CLI to make it into a PDF/DOCX/website/whatever.
Wordpad can also open most Word files. Even though I have Office, I open word files in wordpad all the time, because it's so much faster to open. When I just need one small piece of info, that I am going to copy and paste, it saves me time.
Spell checker works in literally every part of windows (more so where you don't want it), this is the lamest weak sauce example on why you need to give me $20 ever.