While that’s technically true, it does use a severely cut down version thereof which is worse in every way: it only supports paragraphs, code blocks, and emphasis so the ability to format is extremely limited but the emphasis can still screw you over, which requires an explicit preview (or posting) to notice.

And I think escaping emphasis was only introduced somewhat recently? I do remember that for the longest time you basically had to trick HN into not breaking your comments by using a different character in stead.

No, but it does use:

    *

for italics, which sometimes causes a comment to go haywire because someone uses it to reference a footnote or otherwise drops it in mid-sentence, with a matching closing one, not intending italics.

(Up-thread I think it probably was like that when they commented, but has since been fixed.)

Btw, you can now(?) escape * in a paragraph with \*.

Yes, it's also automatic in some cases - originally my comment had an attempt at a joke example of it, but it was caught and didn't work. It was definitely improved relatively recently.