Markdown is a markup language for relatively simple structured documents. You can convert it to HTML, but you could as well convert it to something else.
> However that is where the use case ends. .MD is not a useful format for many other cases unless you want to prove to the programmers that you too can do tricky stuff in plain text. For the rest of us it has little value.
It's used by Reddit and some content management systems. Regular users don't have any problems with it. It's a lot easier to use than HTML and also more convenient to use than RTEs.
Markdown isn't for writing HTML. It's for writing the actual content.
I wrote about 100 articles in "raw" HTML. I surely don't miss those days. It was error prone and the tags added very distracting visual noise.