Some markdown parsers (e.g. in IntelliJ Idea) treat the expression between ... as LaTeX Inline math (1) mode as a result the text is displayed without spaces and in italics which is the default for LaTeX. I suggest adding a \ escape character to avoid such issues.
I’m sorry this happens, but this is an issue of IntelliJ Idea not having proper Markdown support, not an issue with our use of Markdown. There are more Jetbrains products suffering from this, e.g. GoLand IDE.
ALL of Jetbrains products have the same plugin (made by Jetbrains) that mangles Markdown and Markdown previews.,
And they’ve been hostile toward any thrid-party plugins that attempt to fix the issues. I have to conclude they’re uninterested in making things better.
I myself have stopped upgrading my IDEs with them so that I can use an older plugin that renders Markdown properly. If I really need to do a lot of Markdown writing, I use VS Code or Typora. or another editor that deals with things better.