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 PNG is
A lossless image format. Text and thin lines stay exactly as drawn, which is what a table is made of.
Slides, chat messages, issue trackers, and anywhere a table has to travel as a picture rather than as data.
What changes when you convert Markdown to PNG
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.
The table is drawn from the data onto a canvas rather than captured from the page, so the whole thing comes out however long it is and however much of it is on screen. Column widths are measured from the content, alternating rows are shaded, and the scale is adjustable so a table for a slide or a print layout can be drawn at two or three times the size.
What carries over from Markdown to PNG
Markdown records 2 things about a table that PNG has no way to hold.
Nothing in PNG records that the first row is a header. It is drawn at the top and looks like one, which is all that is left of the distinction.
PNG is the end of the line for this data. Reading the table back out of it is a separate and much harder problem than writing it, so keep the Markdown if you will need the values again.