That, and apps frequently do all sorts of things they "don't get to" do.

That's a bad thing, not a good thing.

Cool. It's also the reality we exist in. I also want to be able to change my settings on a per app basis. Some stuff I use up close to my screen and am fine with small font. Some stuff I use while leaning back in my chair with my feet up on my desk. I don't want to go control panel diving.

As someone whose visual acuity is fading as I age, I rely a lot on being able to configure my system to make the default font big enough that I can comfortably read it. I HATE it when some app decides to override my system settings & use an 8 point font on my 4K screen.

And I'm getting that we're all geeks. My mother isn't. Fine tuning the OS would be completely beyond her.

Indeed. And again, in a text editor no less. Yes Notepad is super basic but not being able to set the font there? That'd be absurd. Hell sometimes I use Notepad to leave a note for someone else at work and I'll set the font to max and write in all caps so they don't miss it

So, do you remember WordPad & NotePad? The entire point of NotePad was that it was pure ASCII, with no formatting at all, whereas WordPad was the same, but with RTF (Rich Text Formatting) that included fonts & sizes.

Yes, I do remember it. And guess what? Having a few quality of life upgrades in a basic piece of software that you don't have to use besides once to set it to your preference (maybe you prefer a different font or have a different use case) doesn't defile the sanctity of Notepad or whatever

Indeed. We should be able to tell our machine that we can't read text smaller than 12pt, & be able to rely on our OS to enforce that.

Sure fine, but even then I wouldn't expect that to affect the behavior of a text editor and to then not be able to override that without going 6 menus deep in one of 3 control panel variants. And hey, Notepad remembers your font settings so just set it once and off you go.

I have to repeat something: we're not talking about defaults here. We're specifically talking about having the option to change your font settings in a text editor. Nobody mentioned OS-wide defaults until you brought it up, and that is a very different conversation.

There's nothing ableist about that. Any user should be able to set system-wide policies to manage their disabilities. Individual apps being able to break those policies makes life worse for disabled people, not better.