Oh, there is a third way to highlight that is nice too that I keep forgetting. It looks like this and is done using this html markup <mark>text</mark>. There’s a community contributed theme component (not available in Teams) that lets you use ==text== instead which is quite handy. Not finding it immediately for some reason.
But anyway, I will discuss with my colleagues about updating the default styling of code blocks so they are more obvious. Maybe even just making the code block background color more distinctive will be sufficient.