Comment by chrisweekly

You're welcome.

Respectfully, you've made some invalid assumptions. Even if your only use case is reading extant markdown, using Obsidian as your viewer probably still makes sense. Trivial, one-time config to open .md files in Read mode, and one-time system config to associate .md files with Obsidian, and voila: "double-click and read the damned file".

That said, if you were then to spend even a little time in Obsidian doing things other than reading, your "mystification" about "pointlessness" would vanish. Markdown is flexible and portable, eminently readable by machines and people (whether viewed raw or rendered), and Obsidian is an incredibly powerful tool for leveraging its capabilities.