What Markdown is
A Markdown table is rows of pipe-separated cells with a dashed rule under the header. Alignment is set by placing colons in that rule.
README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, Obsidian and Notion.
What INI is
INI is the oldest configuration format still in daily use: named sections, then key equals value lines.
Windows software, PHP, Git and a long tail of tools that never moved on.
What changes when you convert Markdown to INI
Leading and trailing pipes are optional and both are handled. A pipe the author escaped with a backslash is read as data rather than a column break, which is the usual reason a hand-written table parses one column too wide.
Each row becomes a section named after its first column, with one key per remaining column.
What carries over from Markdown to INI
Markdown records 2 things about a table that INI has no way to hold.
INI has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the Markdown - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in INI and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the INI as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a INI file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the INI.