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 Plain Text is
Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.
Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.
What changes when you convert Markdown to Plain Text
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.
Columns are padded to the widest value. Width is counted in display columns rather than characters, so a table containing Chinese, Japanese or Korean text still lines up: those glyphs occupy two columns in a monospace font.
What carries over from Markdown to Plain Text
Markdown records 2 things about a table that plain text has no way to hold.
plain text has no separate idea of a header, so the column names become an ordinary first row and nothing in the file marks them as different from the data.
Anything visual in the Markdown - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in plain text and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Plain Text 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 Plain Text file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Plain Text.