Yes. Org Mode. I.e. the huge, extremely versatile, extensible and powerful (and complicated at times) Emacs package that uses (and defines) this format.
As a way of marking text up, it's not much different from everything else. But combined with org mode, it's probably the most hacker-friendly system for managing todos, events, habits, information, and multiple-format publishing - and all of that in simple plain text.
Personally, I use org mode for blog posts on my new site, for managing my todos, meetings, notes, brainstorms and personal wiki. People also use it as a better (self-hosted!) equivalent of Jupyter notebooks, for literate programming, and plenty of other cool things.
So, TL;DR: it's not the format that's the magic, it's the software around it.
EDIT:
Oh, and tables. Org mode has the single most productive plaintext interface for manipulating tables. It can even work as a basic spreadsheet in a pinch.
The main feature of org-mode I find really helpful is the org-agenda. You could just try a bit.
You don't have to learn Emacs shortcuts, arrow keys work. For navigating between files use the menubar with a mouse.
File -> Open file -> testtodo.org
Type "* Something to do", hit C-c C-t, TODO will appear, hit C-c C-t again, the state will be marked as DONE.
Hit C-c C-s, calendar will open you can select a date to schedule.
Hit C-c [ to add the file to your agenda (permanently).
Hit M-x, type "org-agenda", a menu will apear, hit a, to see all your scheduled items for the week. Hit j to select another date.
(C is control key, M is meta key, a.k.a Alt)
(C-c means ctrl+c, C-s means ctrl+s, M-x means alt+x, you get the idea)
That's all there is, it takes some getting used to, but a plain text format is really productive. You can easily search between items, transfer your files, customize it all you want. I probably use very of org-mode's capabilities, but it really helped me organize my life.
Yes, the org file format is only really powerful when combined with the Emacs extension. That said, for people who already DO use the Emacs extension, it's fantastically more convenient to use as a document markup format than anything else, since you can add tags, TODO items, scheduled dates, etc, and it will all integrate with your existing calendaring/reminders/project planning/whatever. Obviously those people (like me) would prefer if they could use their precious file format everywhere.
So no, org-the-file-format doesn't really offer anything to anyone that isn't an org-the-emacs-extension user, but on the other hand it is pretty much feature-equivalent to Markdown/ReStructuredText/etc for most things. Therefore, other than the (significant) switching friction, it would seem to make sense to make more tools speak org-the-file-format in at least a rudimentary way: non-org-the-emacs-extension users don't really lose anything, and org-the-emacs-extension users will gain quite a bit. Github allows a README.org file to be the project front page now, and it's great. It doesn't deal with ALL the features of org, but I can pretty much treat it as an ordinary org file with tasks, and subtasks, and so on, and still have it look relatively nice for someone looking at the repo in a browser.
That's all the VScode thing is trying to do: make org-the-file-format a little bit less painful to use outside Emacs. It's not trying to ape all the features of org-the-emacs-extension, which would be madness.
Yes. Org Mode. I.e. the huge, extremely versatile, extensible and powerful (and complicated at times) Emacs package that uses (and defines) this format.
As a way of marking text up, it's not much different from everything else. But combined with org mode, it's probably the most hacker-friendly system for managing todos, events, habits, information, and multiple-format publishing - and all of that in simple plain text.
Personally, I use org mode for blog posts on my new site, for managing my todos, meetings, notes, brainstorms and personal wiki. People also use it as a better (self-hosted!) equivalent of Jupyter notebooks, for literate programming, and plenty of other cool things.
So, TL;DR: it's not the format that's the magic, it's the software around it.
EDIT:
Oh, and tables. Org mode has the single most productive plaintext interface for manipulating tables. It can even work as a basic spreadsheet in a pinch.