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> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography,

Some "extended" flavors will allow you to embed HTML and CSS which solves the layout problem. It's not really markdown at that point, though.

> embedded binary content,

If you're using one of the extended variants, you can b64 encode images... but again, that's not really the spirit/intent of markdown.

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It’s not just “extended” flavours of Markdown that allow embedding HTML. The original reference implementation supports this too.[0]

> For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

However, there is no way to switch back to Markdown inside HTML, so if, say, you want to have an <article> tag around your article, you need to write it entirely in HTML.

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