The whole point of Mermaid is _not_ having to embed .png's into your Markdown files.
By using the built-in codeblocks functionality of Markdown, Mermaid allows you to source-control the same exact graphs that you would have normally put in as images.
That was a piece of information I missed, then! Definitely a nice usecase to keep in mind.
For me, I'm often either (1) sharing diagrams outside of github (e.g. email), as well as (2) generating a bunch of diagrams based on code or whatever, rather than defining a diagram in a markdown file. There may be better tools for those usecases. Those were what I was trying to do last weekend, too.
But I've definitely passed on adding diagrams to my .md files, or sighed at needing to add yet another imgs/ dir and files to a repo folder. My toolbelt now has another thing hanging off it!
By using the built-in codeblocks functionality of Markdown, Mermaid allows you to source-control the same exact graphs that you would have normally put in as images.