The argument isn't that Markdown is bad because there are competing implementations. The argument is that Markdown is bad because there is no standard for those implementations to adhere to, so they end up being wildly incompatible. With HTML, there will be browser differences, but there's a pretty well-defined standard which browsers try to adhere to; there will be bugs, but at least you can know you're writing standards-compliant HTML, and then work around particular browser engines as necessary.

You say Markdown has a common set of features, but what is that common set? There's no standard, and I find myself surprisingly frequently struggle with figuring out what's the correct way in a particular markdown engine to do what I need to do.

An example is that in Reddit's markdown; this text:

    ```
    if (true) {
        console.log("hi");
    }
    ```

will all end up as inline code, with all the newlines and extra whitespace stripped out. The correct way to do it in Reddit's markdown is to hit the space bar (n+1)*4 times before each line, where n is the indentation level. Some (but presumably not all) other markdown engines would render it as a code block.

Markdown engines are also wildly inconsistent about when they treat something as a link, and whether they require a blank line between a paragraph and code blocks or lists.

They seem to mostly agree about how explicit links and bold and emphasis and headings work though, so if that's your consistent common set of features, I suppose you're right.