I was mistaken, it's in the description if of kind 1, text notes, and it specifically says it should be plaintext and further says "Content that must be parsed, such as Markdown and HTML, should not be used." So clients shouldn't even be doing any formatting. Pretty sure long form content is supposed to get markdown formatting by definition, though, so perhaps the client is publishing as long form to get markdown support.
Discussion
Thanks to both of you for the insight.