Yeah, but they're still calling it "Gitlab Flavored Markdown". The release was just about how they're changing the renderer. This does nothing to reduce the confusion with the fact that there are still two "flavors" of Markdown called different things but referred to with the same acronym, but I guess now both rendered by the same backend? This makes no sense to me.

The additions GitLab has expand on Markdown. For example, if you comment with a string of hexidecimals larger than 8 characters, GitLab will try to link to the commit if it finds one. For issue 1, the reference pattern in #1. This is convenient in cases where you want to cross reference merge requests, snippets, and others, without copy pasting the links. The docs explain it better than I could: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/markdown.html

But in general, GitLab supports Markdown, with a few extensions.