The ¶ toggle adds a format to each side: bold / italic / underline and a
paragraph style, as LibreOffice's Format… and its Paragraph Styles box.
A format narrows a text search to the runs carrying it, and with no term
the formatting is the search — every such run, or every paragraph in the
style, empty ones included.
A replacement with no text only reformats, which is how a document gets
restyled without retyping it; a heading style switches the node type over
the way setParagraphStyle does, so the extension takes the same sheet.