I can see a lot of applications for this kind of domain specific language that is built on top of Markdown. As long as you can live with its limitations, it should be productive for many people.

which others are you familiar with? ideally I’d like a good way to author visual explainers without having to do too much front-end work. I’m a back-end and math kind of person

Prezi is a very large company in the visual explainer market. A Hungarian/American company, they make a very popular product.