Maybe related to T54180?

VE only pastes the cell formatting that it understands and can edit – it will copy-paste the cell "type" (header vs content) and rowspan/colspan values. It won't copy-paste any other attributes. So yes, this might require T54180 first.

In T189583#4053095, @matmarex wrote:

So yes, this might require T54180 first.

I don't think it does. T54180 requires creating menu options and icons on the VE ribbon, the copy/paste with formats (which should be the default, as it is in other word processors) only requires the full cell to be copied instead of only the text component:

|| align=center style=background:yellow | 243,567 || vs || align=center style=background:yellow | 243,567 ||

@Guarapiranga and I discussed this at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Vcbua5cr5l5z2w6d On the one hand, if what you copied is exactly what you want and you just paste it in, then that's great. But if it's not, and now you can't change it, then that's a problem.

I agree that cell formatting not being transferred after copying/pasting is unintuitive. For me, there should be 3 types of paste:

1. All cell and text formatting: -
2. Text formatting only: Ctrl + V
3. No cell or text formatting (plain text): Ctrl + Shift + V

I would suggest Ctrl + Alt + V for 1 if consensus is to not transfer all cell formatting by default.
This, along with T54180 would probably allow most basic editors to not need to switch from the VE, when editing tables at least.