> Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter

After saying MD is "easy to read" the meaning of "parsing" is clearly limited to automated parsing by non-humans, and the only reasonable reading is "provided the markup is easy to read for humans, the difficulty in constructing an automated parser is irrelevant".

Conveying meaning at the bitwise operator level is a different thing than applying emphasis to a few words in a sentence with bolding or embedding a hyperlink in a document.

> no one would use its ridiculous link or image syntax.

And many don't, which is fine! But some do, if they remember the syntax. Markdown is tolerant of that, and ultimately if the file is rendered to HTML Markdown engines know to just turn raw URLs into hyperlinks.

> The reason you write with Markdown syntax is because you want to be able to format it

Maybe sometimes. Not always. That's the point. A lot of the time it's nice that most technical people who write docs in text files all agree on what headings, lists, emphasis etc. should look like in plain text so we don't have to constantly do a dance of negotiating what the markup is. And the bonus on top of that is we can also get a reasonable HTML page out of it.

> If you don’t know the rules well enough, your mental parse will be incorrect, and you’ll produce errors. Errors that won’t be detected by your computer. That’s the hazard with Markdown

I mean, 'hazard'. Kind of an over-the-top way to put it. It's a text file for documentation purposes, not a production system handling money or something. Nobody cares if the Markdown has a few syntactic errors. The point is to convey information to other humans in a reasonably efficient way.