Ah, seems like the situation is better than I remembered. I confused colored syntax highlighting with the default settings, which highlight using font weight/italicness etc.
I did try minted once, but never used it in practice. The dependency on pygments making the documents more system dependent is less than ideal.
You can of course redefine the default style if you don't like it, but that is no more work than doing the equivalent in CSS (I guesS?) for whatever MD renderer one uses.
I agree that pygments adds a bunch of dependencies, which may be too much just to get some colored syntax highlighting.
I did try minted once, but never used it in practice. The dependency on pygments making the documents more system dependent is less than ideal.