Ruby is extensible as well, these things flourish because their creators thought hard about escape hatches. The things that are not extensible we don't talk about because they already died.
But you can't abstract. I can't make a custom template for an image + caption, and use it throughout my markdown document.
You can do some pretty wild stuff with html. But if you do, you get an unreadable jumble of markdown and HTML. It loses the single advantage of markdown - which is that its human readable as a text file.
HTML is human readable as a text file.
It does lack abstraction though.
I don't actually like markdown much but it is quicker for prose and when I want my images styled a certain way I drop to HTML