Those formatting codes are informative content. They tell the reader (even in plain text) that something is a section heading, bullet, code, etc.
This is information people often want in a plain text file, and having a common way to signal those things is beneficial when working on teams or sharing with others.
What’s the alternative? Everyone makes up their own bespoke way of formatting their text file that works for them, then has a key to explain it in their doc?
I'm not "playing dumb" it's basically exactly the type of text I would type in my notes before it was codified. Headers, bullets, bold, italic, all would have fit in perfectly in text-based Usenet groups of the 90s.
It's not "clutter" it's meaningful information for the human eye in plain text.
Which is why I'm asking: what's your alternative? Is it no headers, no lists, no standard * or \_ for emphasis, as it has been done long before Markdown existed?
Except that they aren't shown as bullets, headers, or bold unless your viewer understands the Markdown codes that invoke those decorations. Which is what I'm decrying the lack of.
My "alternative" is to have DEDICATED, lightweight Markdown viewers. The major OSes have long come with a simple text-file viewer that can render RTF. Why not Markdown?
In the meantime, I'm mystified as to why the format is so rampant when there is so little support for it.
The whole point of Markdown is that the formatting codes intutitively make sense and are readable even without a viewer and without needing to read a specification first. People have been using asterisks as bullet points and to emphasise things long before anyone came up with Markdown.
Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to most people.
Typically, italic formatting indicates gentle emphasis, bold formatting indicates strong emphasis. Given this, * and * make sense. However, typically people use _ for gentle emphasis in Markdown, which makes _even more_ sense. Be careful not to confuse specification of rendering,
As for - and >, they've been in use in plain text email clients for bulleted lists and quotations for 35 years now [1].
I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that the example I provided is not intuitively recognizable as a block quote. And it gets worse when you have more nested decorations.
If everyone's just using a plain-text reader to view these files, then why clutter them up with formatting codes?