I am also using mermaid. Like Markdown, it has a ton of shortcomings. But just like Markdown, the big win is that it forces me to keep things simple.
Markdown forces me to focus on just the words, not the layout and fancy formatting. Mermaid does the same thing for diagrams: Anything I can draw with a pencil but can't express in Mermaid must be simplified or broken into separate sub-diagrams.
This would be terrible if I was trying to draw a diagram of the entire infrastructure of a modern SaaS company, but is actually good when I am trying to write a post explaining ideas: Multiple simple diagrams interspersed with text get the job done.
I recently wrote about using Markdown with Diagram codes https://blog.diagram.codes/posts/markdown-intro/ (I'm the creator) it's a complementary desktop tool with (web version is limited and free, desktop is paid)
I love text based tools but wanted to create something that users without technical backgrounds can use, I feel that a lot of existing tools are too complex for casual users.
