> That works great, until you write markdown and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags..

If you are in the new editor for Confluence Cloud (i.e. the editor based on ProseMirror rather than TinyMCE), you can sometimes get it to do "the right thing" of converting pasted markdown to formatted text by copying from a different text editor. For example, for me copying from windows notepad always does the right thing, but copying from vscode doesn't.