HTML isn't some arcane binary format or compressed or something. You can view it anywhere you can view a text file. If as a publisher you want your HTML to be readable in a text viewer it's trivial to run tidy (or whatever linter you prefer) on it. You'll get nicely indented text blocks perfectly readable in a text viewer. The output is no less readable than "plain text" marked up with a bunch of faux page layout like hard line breaks and lines of dashes under headings and the like.
The JavaScripter über alles crowd generates some downright abusive HTML and CSS even when generated as a static document but there's no intrinsic reason for that. HTML can be a fairly lightweight markup on top of text. Even while being lightweight it can bring significant enhancement over plain text by being able to carry metadata, encoding information, semantic information, and even provenance through comment tags.