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I've taken to paste everything in kate or notepad first, then recopying it and dropping it to the final destination. Happy to hear a big software package moving to better defaults. Hopefully a lot of others follow their example.
In many contexts Ctrl+Shift+V will paste without formatting, but I’m still a bit hazy on exactly when it does/doesn’t work
In my experience it works consistently everywhere in Windows, but is very hit or miss in macos.
Wow, about time. Preserving source formatting was the most moronic, idiotic default option I have ever seen
I’ve used Word since the early 90s (before the GUI version) and one thing has been consistently true for all that time: the defaults for many things in Word are not what I would intuitively assume them to be. Paste and “Paste Special” are perfect examples of this. And don’t get me started on “bullets and numbering”. How a feature used so often can remain so functionally broken for so long in such a popular piece of software just does my head in.
It makes a lot more sense when you consider copying from a document then pasting in another location. If you copy a header you want it to stay a header, if you copy coloured text you may expect it to be coloured.

It makes a lot less sense when pasting from other locations. Especially if for example you copy one sentence of a webpage that uses a specific font throughout, you are likely not expecting that font to be preserved, you weren't even thinking about it.

So probably they went for consistency, which ended up being the wrong choice. At the end of the day there are cases for both. Adding heuristics all day ends up confusing for the user so picking a default is hard.

There may be trade-offs and arguments on many sides, but the resolution is obvious and should be universal:

Hippocratic Defaults: First Do No Harm.

Principle Of Least Astonishment (POLA).

Provide all possible damage and astonishment in the right-mouse pop-up. Caveat Clickor.

There are certainly cases for both. The default case should be the simple one that you want most of the time, ie. don't drag formatting from one document to another, just drag the information.
ive liked it only for keeping a html-rendered-table and pasting it into excel (or word as a table) - but should be a special copy/paste feature vs auto-on by default. cant wait for apple to catch on - esp when working in a terminal and pasting to a chat/wiki/ect

but who knows, maybe thats why dark-mode vs light-mode is still hard to implement, they have to deal with how copy-paste formatting works behind the scenes lol

edit: typos, fixup ideas

One trick I've found in Word specifically: press Ctrl+v to paste, then hit Ctrl, then hit 't' -- this is the key sequence for paste->open paste options->use plaintext.

You can do the same thing by pasting, then click on the little box that pops up next to your pasted text, then clicking the text option.

I'll miss it, that feature was always kind of a copy-paste canary.
Should be an OS wide option, not app specific.
Honestly it bothered me waaaay more in excel than in word.