I am not really sure if I understand correctly... I think you want an image to show up as text? If so, you can pipe the text node into the blue mask input of your media in node.
Text+ has a bunch of modifiers, yes. These are unique to Text+ and these modifiers arent available on other nodes, so you are correct in that statement. But you can still use all your text modifiers on your text, and as long as you are using it as a mask, the image will update.
EDIT: OR text+ > bitmap mask > media in
where the bmp would create an alpha for your text and use that to mask the image/video.
not sure why that is, since text should have an alpha. wasnt working for me, but it worked when I piped in a bmp.