You cannot claim you're "against feature bloat" while then in the same breath say that it is acceptable that a basic text editor have an entire additional render pipeline.
If you want Markdown use VSCode, it is a first class citizen. Don't take an intentionally stripped down text editor and bolt on VSCode-like features.
As I posted in a sibling, I thought the whole point of markdown was that it was simplified to the point that rendering it was easy to do from scratch. But we fumbled that because we (collectively) have no idea what we are doing.