It’s amazing to me how Apple got this basic setting so wrong. It would be interesting to see the decision process that was used and if it was decided correctly maybe overridden by an individual?
Apple also aimed for simplicity, and when copying between MacWrite and MacPaint (the only two applications everybody had), keeping formatting was the best option.
Add a few decades of people getting used to that behavior, and changing it takes guts, and will upset quite a few users who know how to repair formatting after pasting, but won’t easily learn about the new keyboard combination.
I also am not sure stripping formatting by default is the best choice today. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38142074, who wants something in-between.
Maybe, paste should keep only formatting of entire units being pasted? So, it would keep bold, italic, etc, but only keep line height, margins, etc. for entire paragraphs being pasted? I can see people getting highly confused about that, too, though, especially about the difference between selecting all characters in a paragraph and also selecting the paragraph boundaries.
Why can't I just have a navigation bar in the finder window that I can manually add in.
Why do I have to google a keyboard combination just so I can view hidden files and folders.
So many little things but they can add up. And it's not a Microsoft v Apple thing. Unix distros dont have a special 'command' button just for them to confuse things.
https://osxdaily.com/2023/05/25/how-to-add-apps-to-macos-fin...
You can create a shortcut (or applescript) that does the things you mention.