Funny. I am in the process of providing basic training on Markdown to our support staff. I think more than 80% of what we now write is in Markdown format. It is easy to read/write for humans. And AI.
Yeah, I understand that it might get confusing to use multiple implementations, or to transition between the two, but I seriously doubt these claims that “regular people” (as in, people who are expected to know how to use Word) are struggling with the syntax itself.
The article pretends that Markdown got popular because “it was there”. 15 years ago people were adopting it _because_ it is dead simple, unobtrusive, and visually evocative.
The ones who made it popular, in other words, did so quite intentionally.