If you remove the indentation, your > will markup the text as a quote. The indentation marks it as unwrapped preformatted text, which renders this text illegible on mobile.
No it won't. It just puts a '>' in front of the line. You can also put asterisks around the text to italicize it (as I've done here). But the '>' has no special support.
> This is just normal body text.
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
> The indentation marks it as unwrapped preformatted text, which renders this text illegible on mobile.
Verbatim/code formatting does totally break legibility, especially on mobile.