Another take on that is that Gruber is unable to sabotage a markdown standard from coming to exist, no matter how much of a tantrum he wants to have. I have no interest in listening to him about the topic, he's just in the way of the community and everyone is routing around the damage.

What Gruber has done is forced the spec to be called CommonMark, but as far as everyone except Gruber is concerned CommonMark is the markdown spec.

There are flavors that predate it like GFM, and extensions, but IMHO going forward it's CommonMark + possibly your extensions or it's not really Markdown.