Yes, I was aware of that. I looked into changing embedded pics into externally linked ones (there was a couple of forum threads dealing with that), but I thought now that I saved out all my images with HTML save (which gives you the formatted rich text plus the images in corresponding folders), I wouldn't need to make that change, only identify where the inline shapes are and mark those places just anyhow (a piece of bold text would do now that I know I will have gotten rid of all the bold by the time I get to this part of the drill).

See, I don't need the pictures, only reference their places within the next (usually in the text I make a comment; 'see attached image'; a cue I could use when I manually go about populating my files with images again), because once I save out as plain text, I say goodbye to all HTML formatting and attached images.
But before the save happens, I would need some "I was here" to help me with re-attaching the pics in the new environment. That's the whole idea. If you save out or render the text somewhere else as HTML and the images are gone or the respective paths have changed, at least you'd get an empty box inline to see this is where a picture used to be. Not with txt (which I needed to reformat for markdown).

(In the meantime, I am looking at other stuff that gives me a headache; I cannot believe automating a change of fonts is so difficult in footnotes; Recorded Macro/Selection method did it once and no more.)