This is very upsetting to me–more as a point of principle than in fact–but I appreciate that it doesn’t bother younger generations at all.
I am in a support group with over 100 senior citizens in it. Getting a file with a *.rtf extension used to be a thing, but it hasn’t been a thing in years. I do get *.doc and *.docx files so they’re probably getting lured into Office like you said even before Wordpad is removed.
Fighting with Windows 11 introduced me to Linux Mint, which works perfectly! I’m not an OS geek, so I really don’t care about the OS – it’s just the thing I deal with on the way to Firefox.