[BooneJS]

Can you refer to figures and have the name rendered? For instance, a piece of text referring to a figure and the figure’s label will both get rendered to “Figure 2.8” regardless of paragraph edits and figures inserted or delete before it?

[Symbiote]

For anything beyond the most basic document, use Acsiidoc rather than Markdown.

I prefer to use the Asciidoctor toolchain, but it's compatible with Acsiidoc.

[thangalin]

Pandoc has an extension for cross-references.

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pandoc-crossref

https://lierdakil.github.io/pandoc-crossref/

[halst]

So far, I got away with "In the following figure…"