Thoughtful answer @agsteele. No harm no foul. Thanks for your expertise. But there definitely do seem to be 100s of people with this specific issue. It is driving me BATS trying to find workarounds each day on my MacOS version.
Example workaround (in case it's helpful for someone else reading) is to duplicate a note if I need a graphic from it in another note (and then delete everything else from the dupe'd note BUT the graphic and build on it) vs. cut>paste. Almost without fail, cut>paste of an image file from one note to another reduces the image to a data blob.