$\TeX$ is one of the masterpiece of Don Knuth.
At some point in the early 2000, I switched to $\LaTeX$ for convenience, and almost exclusively use the latter now. Most of this page
To use footnotes to feature reference-style annotations, that is, with no subscripts and with enclosing brackets [1], add in the preamble:
\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\@makefnmark}
{\@textsuperscript{\textit{\tiny{\@thefnmark}}}}
\makeatother