> What you're asking for is an uncommon edgecase that's not what people want in 99% of circumstances
It's how it worked before this change, and how it works for every other language in Markdown. This is taking away functionality with no reasonable replacement and creating a special-case gotcha in the Markdown syntax (the same syntax could produce highlighted code or a rendered image depending on the language and what features any particular Markdown implementation supports), and it's not clear why this is necessary when something like ```!mermaid would work just as well to trigger rendering. It's unforced bad language design.
> Use a tool like pygments to generate the highlighted HTML
This requires hardcoding colors into the generated HTML, so the highlighting won't match the color theme of the context that the document is embedded in, breaking e.g. dark mode.
It's how it worked before this change, and how it works for every other language in Markdown. This is taking away functionality with no reasonable replacement and creating a special-case gotcha in the Markdown syntax (the same syntax could produce highlighted code or a rendered image depending on the language and what features any particular Markdown implementation supports), and it's not clear why this is necessary when something like ```!mermaid would work just as well to trigger rendering. It's unforced bad language design.
> Use a tool like pygments to generate the highlighted HTML
This requires hardcoding colors into the generated HTML, so the highlighting won't match the color theme of the context that the document is embedded in, breaking e.g. dark mode.