I’m really not understanding the fundamental thing here. How is the integrity of the content being maintained by the current behavior? It’s clearly not.
It seems like if you’re going to replace HTML with markdown, replacing it with markdown which correctly renders is… the only right answer.
It’s not like we’re doing anything fancy on the Wordpress side – it’s just the normal block editor and people adding images in the normal Wordpress way.
I’ll go ahead and use the “disable image download” setting to see if that helps us out, but I’d really, really prefer for this to just work.