Actually I'd swear that disks formatted with those programs were readable on a machine without the TSR, but I think it might depend on exactly what technique you used. Microsoft and IBM both used magic on some of their installation disks to cram more data: Office 97 install disks crammed 1,680k of data on each floppy, while OS/2 crammed even more, 1,840kb on their install floppies. The Microsoft floppies were "DOS compatible" because the standard floppy driver was able to handle the disk geometry read from the disk and work with it while the OS/2 ones were completely alien so far as DOS was concerned without a TSR.
The disks from "fdformat" were essentially the same as the Microsoft disks, I suspect that was the program I remember playing with.