For a computer, text is a binary format like anything else. We have decades of tooling built on handling linear streams of text where we sometimes encode higher dimensional structures in it.

But I can't help feel that we try to jam everything into that format because that's what's already ubiquitous. Reminds me of how every hobby OS is a copy of some Unix/Posix system.

If we had a more general structured format would we say the opposite?