If you wanted strictly markdown then you could just stick to markdown, but the set of popular features which extend markdown are developing consensus across the

If you wanted strictly markdown then you could just stick to markdown, but the set of popular features which extend markdown are developing consensus across the ecosystem, such that you can get most of Obsidian's functionality with less than a handful of popular VSC extensions. In that sense Obsidian is just a fancy viewer for documents which can be edited in VSC. And with regards to vanilla markdown (which would exclude the likes of Github or Gitlab, or the most popular extensions on VSC), personally, I wouldn't be satisfied with the exclusion of Latex which is already in widespread support across markdown supporting apps. Community markdown is a moving target because John Gruber's initial vision is frozen in time whilst the demand for innovation is ballooning. It's unfortunate because the trademark for markdown is in some ways in the same ballpark of value as the community buy-in for the technology.