Except it's not just a markup format. When connecting it to the agenda system in emacs you end up with emacs lisp snippets (easily, not always) in your org files. And that's just part of the basic usage:

  %%(org-anniversary 2021 11 18) It's been %d years since the 50,000th org-mode thread on HN.

Or with org-babel you can have different blocks of code interact with and reference each other:

https://orgmode.org/manual/Environment-of-a-Code-Block.html

That's a lot more than markup at this point since you can run those inside of org-mode.

Completely agree. I think there's a continuity between the misconception of Org Mode as being just being another markup format and Emacs being just another text editor.

Emacs is the operating system. Viper is the text editor.

/s

Thanks for knocking some cobwebs off the old neural pathways. I’d totally forgotten about viper mode.

> It needs a much better name if it wants to be a standalone markup.

It doesn't. There have been failed efforts in standardizing the grammar. If they can't even do that, it's clear that being standalone is not a goal.