I almost dropped dead in shock to see they updated MS paint to Paint 3D, but then I realized that Its still intentionally limited and severely clunky to encourage you to spend money on Photoshop. :/
I also use notepad as my goto “paste without formatting” as it’s typically faster to wash the clipboard through notepad than use whatever “paste special” ui an app has.
Formatting isn't the only reason to use it. I never bother to try notepad.
It’s a similar preference to how I like vim. Vim is ubiquitous on *nix systems. Lots of better stuff, but I’m ok enough with vim.
I turn on the address toolbar on the taskbar (underneath all the icons); it's great to navigate to files/directories by typing (especially with auto-complete, which wasn't there on Windows 9x!), and I also use it for "clipboard washing".
I often find myself also just pasting old bits of text in there similar to how some people might leave old versions of code commented out while working on a replacement - its a sort of shelf/sidebar to place things that I might need later.
Then again, it does have some strange little features. Like if you put the string ".LOG" at the top of a .txt file and open it again in Notepad, Notepad will insert the current date/time at the bottom of the file and move the cursor to the bottom.
I can get that being a useful feature, kinda. It's like someone snuck an extra feature into Notepad and it never got caught.
It's really nice to have a plain text editor that doesn't help them in any way, produces files that will work in the browser and they get to learn better I think. Maybe a small use case but one that makes me glad the tools exist.
It has a use for READING text-files