MDX Is a Content Model Wearing a Syntax Highlighter
Date Published
The pitch is genuinely useful — an interactive chart or a custom callout embedded directly in otherwise-plain content, without a page-builder abstraction in between. What that pitch undersells is that MDX files are now part of the codebase in a way plain markdown never was: they get built, they can throw errors, and a typo in a component prop is a build failure, not a rendering quirk.
That trade is worth it for teams who want writers and developers working close together in the same files. It's a worse fit for teams who want non-technical writers publishing independently, since MDX's power is inseparable from its coupling to the app's component tree.
The practical dividing line is less "markdown vs. MDX" and more "who's actually writing the content" — the answer to that question decides which trade-off is the right one, not the other way around.