I've used this in the past and enjoyed it. My one complaint, if I recall, is that you have to use its own built in file format to maintain all the cool features like anchors and resizable boxes and stuff. You can't just point at at an ASCII drawing in a markdown document and get all the functionality for free. I suspect if someone really wanted to they could crack that through clever algorithms and LLMs - and I've extensively used the latter to work on first drafts of ASCII diagrams to some success. But I've never found a good balance of maintainability (i.e. a box is a box and I can move it and have its connections follow it around) and portability (everything really is just pure text). If I'm wrong about recent versions of Monodraw or something else achieves this I'm all ears! I certainly had more success with Monodraw than artist mode in Emacs, at least.
Interesting take. Do you have a lot of existing diagrams you'd like to manage? If I'm starting from scratch, I would sort of expect/want to have the abstract file format like this, seeing it as like a PSD, and the output as a rendered, flat image like PNG. Or source code vs. binary. Parsing an output artifact back into a more semantic and abstract form is hard to get perfect, I would imagine.
There are times when I've wanted architecture diagrams to be ASCII in markdown, meant to be consumed through GitHub or in a Backstage portal or something. For me, the ideal workflow would be to just be able to edit those inline but still have cool editor features. Maintaining a separate file is just hassle, and it's hard enough trying to keep diagrams alive as part of documentation as it is.
