Like with WordPerfect, there are people who get great utility (attorneys in WP, developers with Markdown), but 80-95% of people don’t get anything out of it.
It’s also one of those things where the constraints are an advantage. Markdown is great for internet facing text content, while many aspects of the mainstream wysiwyg editors are really descended from solutions for placing text on paper.
Unfortunately there’s no realistic solution to the lock-in, so wrestling with broken paragraph formatting, mismatched text sizes, auto-numbering errors, etc at 2am before a client deadline remains the norm. One of the most frustrating parts of the job.
I write stories and everyone uses Word documents for editing.
I was on a project and complained heavily that we were not using styles,. The complaints got my manager to state that another person would do all the formatting. Of course the other person left befor the end and I had to do all the formatting.
Paste additions to the middle of a numbered list from legacy documents that break the number sequence and use custom fonts altar create weird problems? Sure.
Allow sociopaths to format text using a series of invisible text boxes? Sure.
Decide to randomly lose the names of editors and contributors? Sure.
Just because I can’t fix my car doesn’t mean I want an unfixable car.
There’s no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into html or ooxml.
Lawyer here: I loved WordPerfect (for DOS) because of Reveal Codes and its easy keystroke macros, which let me write an Emacs keyboard emulator for it. (Yes, I eventually did one for Microsoft Word for Windows, which I use to this day.)