1. No, the data is already local, the app is already local, you're not relying on anything.
2. Or it might be orders of magnitude easier to parse vs replicating all the plugins functionality. You're just arbitrarily making the alternative worse
3. That's again something you've made up that's not a generic feature of alternative proprietary format
4. It might also be export to markdown. Again, unless you make up artificial barriers
But you can also do it the other way, for example, anything non-trivial like some large table with in-cell formatting won't be readable in your primitive plain text-based proprietary format, so it will be much worse that the unreadable Excel xml or its binary alternative, but that would still be a much preferable export format since no, you're not going to develop a new spreadsheet parser that some obsidian plugin uses to make sense of it
> it's fairly readable even without any parsing, as opposed to, say, exporting in HTML.
that's true for primitive formatting needs, but in this case there are tools that can convert html to markdown that would easily do that