Great! Another LaTeX competitor, doubtless "better" for an obscure reason known only to its author. Especially appealing is the fact that, when embedded in a Web page, it must be translated into LaTeX syntax before rendering by MathJax.

The "AsciiMath" name reveals volumes, because prior to rendering, LaTeX code is already ASCII characters meant to represent math symbols. We just didn't call it that.

Oh well, a tempest in a teapot, soon to be forgotten. We can already tell a chatbot, "Show me the tensor equations of General Relativity, and render the result in LaTeX."

I close with the obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/927/

>for an obscure reason known only to its author

It's, in project's words, simple calculator-style syntax (can also call it simplified LaTeX subset or that ad hoc math syntax used in emails but standardized) made to easily embed math on web pages by converting to MathML, with its existence predating MathJax by few years (and even MathJax's predecessor, jsMath). It was never meant to be LaTeX competitor.

With last point, have noticed people most often use this xkcd strip opposite to what it means. It's about when, for a particular use case, one standard/tech/whatever tries to replace all others rather when one standard/tech/whatever attempts to fulfill a distinct use case.

Not having to write \left and \right everywhere doesn’t seem like an obscure reason…

Why does it make you angry when people make things? Making things is good! You should try it!