The problem: there is no money to be made in writing software libraries these days, no matter how much a working solution is needed. So sadly, we're going to be stuck with all these suboptimal solutions for many years to come.
Maybe that's true. A lot of people tried the RTE stuff, and Basecamp/37Signals came close with a solution (I forgot the name). I guess it's a hard problem by definition, dealing with copypasted stuff from Word, dealing with browsers, etc. After using my simple Markdown solution for some years now, I came to appreciate the bare basic style of it. But it's not for every use case.
It‘s called Trix and I‘ve switched from Trix to TipTap because the whole plugin system works way better. And having the ability to process the document programmaticaly (TipTap = JSON, Trix = HTML) has opened a lot of possibilities for us.
The problem: there is no money to be made in writing software libraries these days, no matter how much a working solution is needed. So sadly, we're going to be stuck with all these suboptimal solutions for many years to come.