> Or does someone claim that the following is unreadable gibberish that they need a parser for?
Unreadable? No. Frustrating to type out? Yes. Underline style is annoying when editing, and even if you technically don't have to match the length you will still feel obliged do. Double backtick is just awful to write, annoying out of all proportion to how much extra time it actually takes.
I do yes. I swear at some point there was markdown or some variant that allowed one single-character thing for italics and another for bold (maybe * for bold and / for italic? And _ for underline?). These days I've mostly just given up using bold.
You are right, there was a convention using that as well: I still have it in my muscle memory too (I always expect bold with a single asterisk). But I can't remember when and what that was.
I still wouldn't go as far to say the MD or RST syntax is hard in any way (and really, asterisk which requires a Shift key is worse than double backticks).
Unreadable? No. Frustrating to type out? Yes. Underline style is annoying when editing, and even if you technically don't have to match the length you will still feel obliged do. Double backtick is just awful to write, annoying out of all proportion to how much extra time it actually takes.