This is what I would have chosen too as it's natural for programmer sensibilities. I can see it as a choice from the "plain text first" philosophy i.e. the thi

This is what I would have chosen too as it's natural for programmer sensibilities. I can see it as a choice from the "plain text first" philosophy i.e. the things you typically write in plain text should not need escaping. My intuition pump is that you can copy-paste an email into .md without edits or surprising rendering. As such, it's doomed to never satisfy everyone. Personally I never use intraword emphasis and I typically only have underscores in non-code names i.e. `this_is_normally_code`.