What is HTML?
An HTML table is what a web page shows and what a browser copies to the clipboard. It carries structure a plain grid cannot - merged cells via colspan and rowspan - which is exactly the part a converter has to expand back into ordinary rows.
What is MD?
A Markdown table is the one people actually write by hand: pipes between the cells, a row of dashes under the header. GitHub, docs sites and half the world's READMEs render them, and their one real subtlety is that a pipe inside a code span is text, not a column break.