I find it funny that CRLF as a vestige of devices long gone is ridiculed, yet the same people don't bat an eye at emulating an in-band sort-of API for controlling cursor movement and display characteristics for similar devices of the past. Heck, *roff and man continue to format text by using overstriking to create underlined and bold text and rely on the terminal emulator to understand that this happened to create a particular effect on physical printers and emulate the result.
Neither world is clean, pure, and free of weirdness that's only properly understood when looking decades in the past.
Actually, the GNU tools (in particular grotty) advanced forward to 1976, and are capable of ECMA-48 control sequences that render actual italics and boldface like the source markup describes. It is just that the people who make operating systems have gone out of their way to disable this.
Neither world is clean, pure, and free of weirdness that's only properly understood when looking decades in the past.