Hi Everyone! I just spoke with the CRM team to get more clarity around this. Html is currently supported for mass email only & not currently supported for email automations. Since this does solve some of the use cases in our thread, I markd the feature as released, since it is solving some of the use cases mentioned above.
After reading your feedback, adding HTML to support for email automations is something that the CRM team is looking to add to the roadmap, in the future and so this thread is still being looked at by our team as they work on the upcoming features to add the roadmap.
As always as soon as I know more I will update! Feel free to keep sharing your thoughts and feedback for the team.