You know what's really stupid about this

Notepad existed for decades, resisting the general trend of Microsoft software, and it continued to do one thing, and do it well (for the purposes of this argument, let's not get started on line endings)

If someone wanted to do more than just view text files, there was wordpad, a stripped down word processor, that would have been the perfect application to add support for markdown to.

Except they killed it, because enough people must have realised that the word processor bundled with the OS did everything they needed without having to pay Microsoft a subscription for Word.

So now Microsoft is trying to turn notepad into the rudimentary word processor that people expect to come with their OS, destroying the aspect that made it useful