I cant really understand why Jupyter Notebooks do this in the first place. It makes it (a) really hard to version control, as there will always be some random blob of non-textual data in the notebook that pops up in a diff and makes it basically unreadable and (b) I can't really see the benefit, as it only stores some part of the data, and not the full table, as far as I am aware.

Enforcing Jupytext is a good adaption, and gives you all the, arguably really nice, comfort from a notebook, and the proper code practice from SW engineering.

marimo notebooks give you the best of both worlds (https://marimo.io)