Use case or problem
It’s a small thing, but as someone who works with a lot of footnotes, the brackets just look so bulky and distracting. This is moreso when I have multiple, consecutive footnotes. Example:
You can’t hide it with CSS either coz the brackets are rendered as text. Here’s the html for one of the footnotes above:
<sup data-footnote-id="fnref-1-497e4e81183456fc" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-1-497e4e81183456fc" aria-describedby="pp-1-497e4e81183456fc" aria-expanded="false"><a href="#fn-1-497e4e81183456fc" class="footnote-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a>[1]</sup>
Proposed solution
Just don’t put brackets around the footnote numbers? Why would you even need brackets there…