I think that the original post and your comment both miss the point in a big way. You are upset at all the people who use markdown and think they are coders. Do you really think such a sample of people exists? Where exactly? Nobody can say that with a serious face and anybody who's into learning markdown has at least enough knowledge to know that.

Use case for markdown: when I build website (by hand, writing pure HTML-CSS-JS on my text editor of choice), adding the copy can be a chore. If I write it in markdown, or ask people to write it in markdown, or reprocess whatever they send me in a markdown editor with html output (I.e. Byword), I save a ton of time by producing a very simple html text block I just need to copy and paste where needed.

Second use case: when I wrote my degree thesis I chose to do that with a normal text processing software (Pages on the Mac). When I had to put it online, I simply copied it inside a markdown editor coupled with a previewer (Marked) and I quickly wrote a couple of scripts to convert footnotes (supported by hyper markdown). Half a day later I had my chapters in a format that I was able to quickly turn into html blocks for my website and convert to ePub with Pandoc. Markdown saved me hours of work.

Third use case: whenever I write a post for the web publications I work for, I write it in markdown with Byword, because it gives me a good distraction-free writing environment and the ability to send my editors (that being myself, sometimes) a perfectly fit HTML a version of the article. When I write articles, I want to focus on writing the article, not writing even the simplest HTML.

Last, but not least, the guy seems to willfully ignore the plethora of very good markdown editors (with incredible support to HTML conversion) out there.

This is why the article sounded more like a bitter rant, than a thought critique.