Microsoft announced today that it will deprecate WordPad with a future Windows update as it's no longer under active development, though the company did not specify the precise timing of this change.
It does allow rich text formatting, it just isn’t enabled by default. And anything it doesn’t do by default once you enable those features, there is probably a plugin to add it.
Notepad++ doesn’t have any form of formatting though, so it’s like underkill for the few narrow things I’d use WordPad for
what sort of formatting?
Bolding, italicizing, I think lists and headers I recall being a thing too
It does allow rich text formatting, it just isn’t enabled by default. And anything it doesn’t do by default once you enable those features, there is probably a plugin to add it.