I disagree that markdown is a shorthand for HTML. It's a plain text doc with standardized ASCII stylistic features, that is basically exactly the way you would

I disagree that markdown is a shorthand for HTML. It's a plain text doc with standardized ASCII stylistic features, that is basically exactly the way you would want to write a plain text document most of the time. It's not really markup. It's markdown. I agree the noted features aren't really special to obsidian, but they might feel special when you consider markdown first and foremost as a plaintext format, and only second as a style convention