I save these text files to my desktop, call me old school.

But then you've only got it locally. The advantage to VCS is that you can trivially have it on multiple machines (desktop, laptop, android with termux). You can even do it between your own machines via ssh if you don't like "cloud" stuff.

Using syncthing you can trivially have it everywhere as well, with only a one-time setup and no continuous need to manually commit changes and manually sync them (unless you're using hooks for your VCS to automate that I guess).

I use syncthing for non-text files, but I keep getting conflict copies. I could probably fix that by having one node always online, but text+VCS means that conflict resolution is built in.