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MD won because it's HTML in a short form and HTML already won because of the web. The adoption of MD as the primary format that LLMs use to read and write doc just sealed the deal. It's a classic case of "worse is better."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

This is literally my thoughts condensed in text. The only reason I do not use an org-mode is that I am a Vim user.

Now I have an explanation for my mental model gap.

As you can see, you don't need to use any special type of characters to mark a URL as such. The tricky part comes when somebody wants to insert a URL with a description text.

I view this as broken. I'm not inserting a URL with description text. I'm inserting text that happens to also point to something else.

Text-followed-by the URL, consistent with text-followed-by a footnote indicator.