What is Markdown?

Plain text with just enough punctuation to imply formatting, which is why it ended up as the default for READMEs, issues, wikis and notes. Its tables are the awkward part - a pipe-and-dash grid that's readable enough written by hand and tedious to maintain by hand.

What is NDJSON?

One JSON object per line, with no wrapping array. That small change is the whole point: a program can read a record at a time instead of parsing gigabytes into memory first, which is why log pipelines, bulk importers and search indexes all speak it.