It seems that it could be related with not having a blank line before the image tag, the paragraph tag (<p>) must be on a different line to the image tag (<img>) this is reported as a bug on the Discourse Meta forum.
It auto converts into an image and gets rid of the <`img> tag. Markdown doesn’t work within 2 lines of HTML code, so is this a Discourse issue? I can report it there, but often I dont get a response, I get a response from somebody in “Team” saying “That shouldn’t happen” and nothing further happens, or somebody tells me to fix that in the admin panel.
(no hate to the discourse team, they’re all pretty chill)
Please use the public forum posts instead of DMing particular staff, that way all of us can see the request!
We generally only schedule updates to the forum at set dates or when important security patches are released by the Discourse team. This is a very low-impact issue so it will be picked up the next time an update happens.