I’m fairly convinced I even observed a predicament where typing an erroneous expression into a cell resulting in a syntax error actually turned the cell into a “text” cell and even a simple =2+2 failed to produce the result 4. It was necessary to paste a functional mathematical construct from another location into the offending cell(s) before they would perform any number crunching. I imagine cutting and pasting performs more than a simple cell>format>number transition.
Ah, I missed that that first step indeed (quite logically) produces numeric content even if the result is formatted as text. Thanks for hinting.