>> The average person does not want to render code.

> I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked

Sounds like you're agreeing with me :-/

Or are you arguing that the average person is a programmer, using programming editors and JS libraries?

I don’t follow. Marked definitely isn’t a programming tool. There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code. That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

> That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

And that’s the main issue with Markdown.

> There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code.

Yes there is. The Common Mark spec, from 2014, says 4+ spaces indents are code. Nested lists go beyond 4+ indents pretty fast.

…as long as you ignore the context that it’s a nested listed under a less-nested list.

Also, note that CommonMark is not identical to Markdown. It intends to be a standard definition of the language, but may differ from the original definition and implementation.