Org mode is far more structured than markdown. Structured enough that so you can naturally store data in, and easily access/edit it later.

Whenever someone tries to do something similar in markdown, they have to invent an extension of markdown to do it.

Yes markdown is simply about formatting text. Org is a data format.

	▲	3036e4 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Markdown really isn't a specific thing with all the incompatible implementations, many of which allow embedding HTML (i.e. "whatever happens to be supported by current version of Chrome" is also part of those Markdown formats). If you pick one of the more sane (or at least less insane) variants of Markdown, like Pandoc's variant, you do get at least some ways to embed data in reliable ways. It also makes it easy to export and style documents and write your own filters that can make use of the data in various ways. In general I prefer to use ORG-mode, but for some purposes I use Pandoc Markdown instead. https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html