Comment by themadturk

Plugins aren't required to use Obsidian. I have just a few, none of which make consequential modifications to my files. I've never had a need to use anything like Dataview, for instance.

To me, the "dialects" of Markdown have never made any difference in using it, even between applications. I think the only non-standard (for whatever "standard" means in Markdown) markup I use in Obsidian is "%%" to indicate comments. That's certainly something easy enough to search for should it be necessary in a text editor.