Why all these dots instead of the spaces that were there & ¶ marks when I Reply to or Forward an email in my new Outlook in Office 2019 Pro+?

I have not seen that happen yet, at least not that I can recall. But yeah, new techonlogy always have a few quirks.

Yeah, new technology quirks can be hard for some of us old-timers to get used to using or even remember. Windows 11 is doing that to me on a few things, the worst being reopening things that I've opened by clicking any of its several popups in the Taskbar if there's more than one. For some reason, sometimes it doesn't go to the one I clicked on but instead goes to another program that's open. Sometimes I need to click the icon in the Taskbar even though there's several popup choices.

GRRRRR

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I can't imagine why I or anyone would even need them.

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A causal user won't need them often but they can be helpful. A few people use them all the time. :(

Most people use them when something in the layout doesn't look right. The non-printing characters, especially the pilcrow symbol and boxes in the corner of table cells, help you to see the elements you're using. The dots for spaces can show you why tabs aren't lining up (usually because there are spaces instead of tabs or spaces following tabs.)

I last used it when a client used tables for customer information and made a mess when he added new customers in the middle. Showing the non-printable characters allowed me to quickly see he had a bunch of separate tables. I also learned he had a habit of using spaces to line up his text, instead of using tabs and line breaks. :( Fixed the tables and the tabs and he thought I was a savant. LOL I told him how to add new entries to the table (tab in the last used cell) but I expect he'll ask me to fix it again next year.

Thanks Diane. That made all of those formatting things go away and I'd not noticed yet, but apparently, they would have also been in other Microsoft docs like Word docs. Now it says that they won't. I can't imagine why I or anyone would even need them. I must be a dumb "normal, simple" User. ;-)
It does mean that telling people to have the cursor in the email's text body is needed for this to be done.
Doing it once seemed to save my decision, since I then Forwarded another email and it too opened up not showing those silly formatting symbols.

So that means that editing the Registry isn't needed at all. Nice simple fix.

There is a registry edit (the settings in Options is stored in the registry) but I don't know the key offhand. I can look it up if needed.