Can you expand on why you think reading plain markdown is hostile? For the vast majority of my Obsidian vault, I could open the markdown file in Notepad and it would be just about as readable as it is in the editor. Of course, you lose the visual effect of the styling, but it's still perfectly legible.
You don't attempt to parse it. You don't try to understand what **foo* bar* means. You just assume things next to * are bullets or emphasized and things next to # are headings.
