I might be dumb, but I thought the whole point of markdown was to get rid of all the bells and whistles of styling, having a really simplified and dumb format that only outlines structure. The follow-on being that many tools could parse, transform and render said markdown files in a way that makes sense for them. That way there's lots of tools that don't share code, but a shared definition of the format. I.e. markdown is a format (!?).
The problem is that overall we seem to have fumbled both the concept and the implementation. There a bunch of vaguely similar but incompatible markdowns and apparently rendering them is too hard and people immediately reach for an enormous pile of software (usually a web stack) to render it for them.
It should have been entirely possible for a person to write a markdown parser in a couple hours and e.g. render paragraphs, bulleted lists and tables into a terminal.
Goals aren't results. It was a goal for Markdown to be simple and universal. It is not a result.
You may be struggling a bit because you are reading some sort of moralization into the statement, some sort of emotional judgment, but there isn't any. It is clear that there does not exist a function that takes a span of "Markdown text" in and emits an abstract syntax tree that everyone agrees upon [1]. That's a fairly mathematical way of putting it, but even from an engineering point of view, the differences matter. Very quickly. It's not like you need to reach deep into crazy syntax to get to real, concrete disagreements between systems, you can hit problems with something as simple as
between the systems where they will do substantially different things.There are literally dozens of markdown formats now.
How we got there, why such a thing exists, as interesting as those questions may be none of them change the reality on the ground. There is no universal markdown to be appealed to. The closest is CommonMark, and that explicitly exists precisely because there was no consensus in the first place. If markdown was a format, CommonMark would never have been created.
[1]: Nor does its inverse, which at times is more frustrating to me than this. I have in mind what I want to do and either can't figure out how to do it or it simply can't be done.
The answer, of course, is to design a new, universal markdown format :)
But seriously though, all those weird markdown formats could easily just have their own custom parsers than then translate into the common format--supposing the common format is the union of all their features.