Ask HN: Why is Markdown considered “faster” than WYSIWYG

For some context: I use Obsidian for maintaining my zettelkasten, and feel fairly proficient in basic Markdown writing. I enjoy it, and I can see some of the benefits to having this as the base for a document. However, I often see people causally referring to Markdown as a faster way to type, or somehow more efficient way of writing than WYSIWYG. I'm confused by this.

The argument I see online is that writing platforms like Google Docs, etc. require you to use your mouse. As a writer and author of long works, I've used Docs for years. For the vast majority of formatting that takes place in writing (bold, italics, M-dashes, etc), these are all keyboard shortcut commands. Quick and easy to do. Headings as well. And, while you can achieve these in Markdown sometimes in the same way (ie command + B for bold), the pure markdown approach of asterisks, underscores, etc seem waaaaay more clunky. Not to mention Obsidian's weird autofill on () and "" where God forbid you want to go back and add either, you're left with deleting excess autofills and the like.

So, what am I missing. Is Markdown not really for long-form writing? Is it another case of "here's something that really great, not for every scenario, but let's pretend like it is."?I trust the sentiment of faster and more convenient is true. But, I'm just not seeing how. Can ya help me understand?

Edit: Could it be that I'm conflating Obsidian's interpretation of markdown with the markdown as a whole? Since Obsidian is my primary use case....

If you never tried before, WYSIWYG is more easy to understand for first timers.

But if you spent some time with markdown, it will be the more effective one to use.

When I work with WYSIWYG editors like Word, I often find myself struggling with unwanted text selection behavior of the editor, formatting issues, program slowdowns due to high CPU usage and the like.

It's faster for me but not for everyone. It depends on what you need.

For complex documents, I resort to LaTeX whenever I can (collaboration often makes Word/Writer mandatory). It's still faster for me than using WYSIWYG unless I'm trying to create something with few text but with heavy formatting. Then, I might prefer Scribus or Illustrator, though.

As an example I used to mostly write the markup where it's accepted even when there are formatting buttons right above the text input area and lately I use an arbitrary mix. There are some editing operations that work very well though, like in Slack where you can select text and Cmd+V a URL that's in your clipboard to make a link--that's easier than the markup or using formatting buttons.