Does slack even use markdown? It seems to me that it just uses some markdown-like sybtax as a shortcut for generating its rich text. Like Google Docs will start a list after -<Space>.
Ehhh there's "Markdown" and there's "markdown". Slack definitely has markdown, and any argument to the contrary is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally use hyperlink text, bullet lists, tt/bold/italics, quote blocks, pre blocks.
A few years ago, Slack was "plain text entry box for markdown"
In ~2019, it changed to "WYSIWYG with markdown converted to WYSIWYG as you type". If you type "Hello *world*" the * will disappear and the "world" will be bolded - and you can also get bold with Ctrl+B or pressing a 'bold' button or pasting bold rich text.
There's an option to disable it [1], so if your slack experience is different you might have WYSIWYG disabled.
And if you think markdown usually means *foo* producing italics, and **foo** for bold, all I can say is yes.
There's an option to post in markdown instead of WYSIWYG. The one and only reason I use Slack's WYSIWYG instead of markdown is because their markdown parser doesn't handle links. If they just fixed that, I could stop using their WYSIWYG and its atrocious handling of inline code blocks.
Because it’s still not Markdown, not by a long shot. https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics may call it “mrkdwn”, but it bears only a very superficial resemblance to Markdown—in significant chunks it’s closer to one or two other lightweight markup languages than to Markdown.
Have you tried recently? There was a period when I also had WYSIWYG enabled solely because markdown links weren't working for me, but that's been fixed (at least for me) for a while now.
