This is kind of a funny comment, markdown was designed specifically to be readable as-is, which is why so much of it’s syntax looks like conventional email and other plain-text usages that predate it.

True, but markdown was meant to be readable for a markup language.

Which is likely still less readable than something whose sole purpose is to present to humans, such as HTML/CSS.

I never got the sense that markdown was even designed, per se - the original markdown.pl script, so far as I understand it, was not intended to implement a formal language at all; its attitude was pure descriptivism, simply rendering what the author thought of as "plain text" in a more typographically-pretty format.

I think a good portion of it would parse as Markdown, but I don't think that was the intent. There's at least 1 header that isn't actually a typical header's content.

What markdown? I don't see markdown anywhere.

The "# headlines", the "* bullet points" would parse as valid markdown. Which would give the headlines visual style to distinguish them from the other part of the content.

Headers in markdown are denoted as # and bullet points as * or - usually.