I work on scientific data repositories [1] and pushed for plain text files as our archiving file format two decades ago as the best long term format. We implemented it on our data repositories. Very human readable also. The datasets are small and table based, so this works well. We latter started archiving 2-D image data and that creates very large files. We are still looking for an elegant solutions for those datasets.
[1] https://earthref.org/FIESTA/