When you look at wisdom principles, like those of the Solomonic kind, you observe that a proverb is profoundly true, wise, and useful when you first hear it, but it starts to feel less so when you subject it to intense scrutiny/deconstruction, or try to extrapolate it to places where it's not supposed to go.

Markdown is like that.

We use it because it's an incredibly human way of writing and reading data without having to wade too deeply into the various forms of overhead that allow machines to read, process, and display it.