I find the code-based drawing tools to be a little finicky for my taste, and the compilation pipelines turn into a real pain if you want to, say, embed a .png i

I find the code-based drawing tools to be a little finicky for my taste, and the compilation pipelines turn into a real pain if you want to, say, embed a .png in a markdown file and just have it display in your Git web interface of choice (obviously GitHub's Mermaid support helps if you're in that environment). My preferred workflow is to use draw.io's PNG support. They embed the draw.io data into the PNG's chunks, so a regular image viewer opens it fine but you can directly edit the file in draw.io. If you have Git set up to diff images, that also "just works" when reviewing the history. Plus, there's an excellent draw.io plugin for VS Code that embeds the editor right into VS Code and will transparently open and save "foo.drawio.png".