Please elaborate how text is most powerful (in which aspect anyway? define powerful) and most effective (surely it isn't or text wouldn't be the prime example for stuff that's good to compress).
He would have to use words for that... Could you help him showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?
Right after you provide an image that's as effective as the text of the First Amendment.
Think of all the non-text technologies involved right now for me being able to read your strawman.
Can you explain the strawman you believe the parent is presenting? What is the original argument, and what is the misrepresentation?
強大的 and 有效的, respectively? (I can see some powerful person in the middle of the first image.)
I am not the source of the original statement, but my own interpretation of "powerful" aligns with simplicity and flexibility. Plain text has only slightly more structure than a stream of bytes, meaning it retains a lot of simplicity and flexibility. Yes plain text can be inefficient and is overused (a proprietary unpublished wire-format does not need to use JSON). However, 50 years from now, the only data I feel comfortable knowing I'll be able to read is plain text (and possibly also JPEG and a few other well-specified and simple binary formats).
Many binary formats are effectively defined by large complex and transient code bases that target particular tool chains and APIs. A new binary format needs to justify itself, less so plain text.