Your solution for the problem described here is to escape with a different character. MD's is to add more special characters. Both are valid and exist in other languages, I wouldn't qualify one as better thought than the other - though since we're talking about text that I don't want modified, if I prefer adding ticks rather than going into the text and escaping them one by one.

The complication doesn't stem from lack of distinct start and end, what you are trying to solve for here, is when you have multiple languages in a single block, and want pretty colors on each. Seeing that HTML doesn't support imbrication of pre tags (or rather doesn't render one embedded in the next), that would probably not work without producing something that is not pure html.

> In a parser that would be much simpler to parse

Parsing a variable number of ` is not more complex than looking ahead for a closing boundary. In fact, once you introduce escaping characters, you need to handle escaping of the escaping character, which is slightly more complex.

The syntax highlighting of the code of each language itself is not the problem. This post is about markdown. A typical markdown parser doesn't do syntax highlighting for code blocks. That's usually done by some other library, like for example pygments. The issue is about markdown syntax. What happens on another language's level does not concern the markdown parser.