Plenty of middle schoolers can handle Reddit commenting just fine. I know I wasn't the only person in high school writing essays in Neovim with Pandoc. A friend and I would do our peer reviews in English by diffing our papers.
Markdown is incredibly straightforward. I'm quite sure it's easier to pick up than a word processor; you can explain all basic formatting on half a page instead of making kids watch a series of YouTube videos on now to use [whatever word processor is hip nowadays]. Programs like Pandoc make it easy to incrementally transition to LaTeX by inlining it in Markdown documents.
I'd say that ideally, teachers should "support" a few programs, but allow students to use any program that can conform to a reasonable style. Either that, or just have students paste their essay text into a box.
Markdown is incredibly straightforward. I'm quite sure it's easier to pick up than a word processor; you can explain all basic formatting on half a page instead of making kids watch a series of YouTube videos on now to use [whatever word processor is hip nowadays]. Programs like Pandoc make it easy to incrementally transition to LaTeX by inlining it in Markdown documents.
I'd say that ideally, teachers should "support" a few programs, but allow students to use any program that can conform to a reasonable style. Either that, or just have students paste their essay text into a box.