The intent at the beginning of the paragraph, but not at the end. Is an IMG meant to be in the paragraph? Is a SPAN? They are inline elements that can indeed be inside a P.
I honestly don't understand this level of laziness in 2023. Editors close tags automatically, ffs. For the sake of saving a keystroke or two we end up with unintuitive and ambiguous crap.
I always have the right amount of well-formed (and well-spanned) TD and TR, making my markup actually logical and simple to understand. Which is not the result we get from open P.
Nope. But if you don't use a closing tag and put, say, an <img> tag below a <p>, the image will be child of the paragraph. Perhaps that's not always what you want.