yes, contemporary editors and tools like treesitter have decided this debate in favor of plain text file representation, exactly for the reasons you give: universal accessibility by general purpose tools.

xslt was a Diana like pre-parsed representation of dsssl. oh how I miss dsssl (a scheme based sgml transformation language) but no. dsssl was a lisp! with hygienic macros! "ikes" they went and invented XSLT.

the "logic" escapes me to this day.

no. plain text it is. human readable. and grep/sed/diff able.