First of all, thank you for a thoughtful response, I was too snarky, sorry about that.

TL;DR: guess I'm just upset that there is no objective way of measuring how much knowledge is required, and trying to read everything from sources list would take forever.

Yeah, the last point is sort of a strawman, although I meant it not to highlight that explanations should be given in terms that the reader is used to, but rather that the reader may have quite arbitrary amount of prior knowledge.

I agree that there probably should be some shared context, what bugs me is that people tend to vary a lot in what amount of context is considered to be required. And more than once have I met papers that require deciphering even if you have some context and kind of come from the field they are written for. I used to think that this is our of malice to make reproducing their work harder for others, but maybe it was just an assumption of much larger shared context.

Tables markdown work in some clients, afaik, but I don't remember which, and even if I saw it or imagined it