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I assume you are talking about the fact that adjacent lines are merged into a single paragraph.

Have you written traditional plain text emails or write any plain text documents? You almost always hard wrap your lines for readability. Even in HTML, newlines are mostly equivalent to just spaces.

This is also very advantageous in diffs; diff-ing a Markdown file with many 1000+ character lines is rather hard.

When does a markdown line get that long?

When people write it like that?

What's even worse is to insert newlines, you use invisible markup that will often get removed depending on editor settings:

"When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return."[0]

[0] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p

You can just use <br>

If the first word after the newline wouldn’t fit on the last line before the newline, you can’t see whether there is a newline.

Also, since you don’t know window width, that can happen even if, on your terminal, the last line of a paragraph is only 3 characters and the first word of the next is “A”.