I agree that that is the "point of Markdown", but that is also not as relevant as how it is actually used. It's one thing to use it as a better BB-code in chat

I agree that that is the "point of Markdown", but that is also not as relevant as how it is actually used. It's one thing to use it as a better BB-code in chat programs, forums and on Github, as other comments mention. However, the article seems to be complaining about how it is used to write websites and articles even when patching the holes in Markdown end up being more of a hassle than just using HTML (that MDN screenshot looks horrible). That goes beyond the example you are talking about. The other argument, that perhaps the issue with rich text formatting isn't the rich text formatting, but the fact that historically rich text formatting tools tended produce awful HTML, also sounds like there might be something to it (not sure if that's still true though). I cannot imagine that it would be that hard to produce minimal HTML that supports 90% of basic rich text needs one has, in a way that is perfectly compatible with any classless CSS framework you then decide to throw at the output.