Yes, I have been fooled by the "oh it's just plain text" notion also and have regretted it. Did you try to actually open an org-mode file with anything else than Emacs? Did you try get any meaningful information out of it on a mobile phone or with an another editor? I did...

Take a look at Orgzly for interacting with org files on Android, and set up a dropbox shared folder between your devices, including your smartphone. Works well for me.

As for extracting meaningful info with other editors, I would say it depends on how you structure your notes. For me it's just a very long bullet list with some tags here and there. So a plain text editor will only 'add' some star characters at the beginning of each lines, which appears quite readable to my eyes.

TBH, I wonder why you had to "leave without your notes", when pandoc eats org-mode for breakfast and gives you a multitude of target options, including markdown (and this is really after wondering what prevented you from using a fresh Emacs install, if you couldn't fix yours, to export them in the first place)

I've been opening org files with Atom, VS Code and inside Github without a problem.

Gogs renders well behaved org files also. The VS Code extension should get the update to allow folding soon. After that the Ctrl-c Ctrl-v crowd could use it nicely with Orgzly and Syncthing say bypassing Emacs until they need a full development environment. You could use Pandoc importing/exporting to other formats without Emacs. For note taking it's promising. Sharing to Orgzly on mobile captures a lot.

All the time. I'm curious as to what problems you were having?

Obviously you won't be able to execute code blocks, reformat tables, follow links, fold sections etc.. but everything is just a search away..