That live rendering exists is in itself a sign that we want more than plaintext. On its own, plaintext is simple, which is why we like it. And it shoves everything directly in your face, which is also why we like it. But many of us also want more than just plaintext, so we invented markup, to add some levels of richness. But this makes it complicated again, and the more we want, the harder it gets, the less support from the tools we have.
Obsidian is now in a space where many people want something more richful, with elaborated data-handling, charts, pictures, videos, code-fragments with syntax highlighting, execution of code-framgments, and so on. The scale of demand is far more than just plaintext, or simple markup, and the tooling can't fetch up at the moment, because anything becomes very dirty and hacky around the higher abilities and more specialized workflows.
And then there is the problem of documentation and learning, which with plaintext is always a big problem, because everything depends on your input. With richtext-interfaces, you have an environment whose whole purpose is to support you in inputing and manipulating which ever richful text/object you want. So they simply scale up better. Which brought me to the realization that a modern environment around richtext and objects is what I really need. Because it's simple to level down richtext, but hard to level up plaintext.