This is why plain text is actually the best *in general*. Although corruption is difficult to spot, it's blisteringly easy to repair by hand because our entire mind is built to recover context from partial-context situations
To expand on that last point: The pinnacle of anti-corruption software consists of both turbo encoding and LDPC encodings. But the problem with that is if you have a huge single chunk of the data wiped out, those codes fail. They're designed for variable errors in a bitstream, if someone runs a pin down a strip of the magnetic tape or whatever you're using, you're stuffed
And because each individual byte only contains a blisteringly small part of the overall structure, it's resilient to certain types of corruption (There is actually no 'one size fit all' corruption mechanisms)