Welcome back to the Forum!
The models are predominantly trained on data in Markdown and therefore inherently tends to return responses in Markdown as well.
There have been lots of discussions and opinions on how to deal with this
Bottom line however is that the easiest way is to programmatically remove Markdown as part of your post-processing step. Personally I use this approach as well and have found it to be the most straightforward solution.
The following thread is an example of a recent discussion on the topic and includes some concrete suggestions on how to deal with this:
I hope this helps!