I hear you about the YAML and I will go with the custom plugin route if I have to, just trying to understand the Obsidian position on this. Seems strange the most basic functionality of mdates gets broken so easily before I even started using it. I’m inviting @WhiteNoise from support to comment.
I found another post on this issue here, and the Obsidian support is stating it’s a one-time formatting fix as I initially suspected. However I did the fc compare on both files as I explained in the previous post, and it found no differences in my case, so I’m not certain it’s the same issue here.
My files are on a local disk in Windows, nothing special.