Excellent post, I think there needs to be a consistent style-guide. These should be as clear as possible so here are my suggestions:
Menu Items
- Add > Mesh > Cube is very easy to type, it gets the point across and provides a logical flow of operations as the brackets hint that each item flows into the other as opposed to listing and separating items with pipes. Italicizing these also separates it from the rest of the content and that is enough.
- For menu items that have entries in the manual, these can be linked in if you deem it necessary.
Example: Add > Mesh > Cube.
Shortcuts
- There should only be one word on each button so either of these can be used interchangeably.
Example: CtrlShiftM and Ctrl + Shift + M are perfectly fine as long as they are chained together in the correct order.
Links
- The default and normal use of links is fine so this is ok.
- For links to the api, it is ok to use backticks (as these are code).
Example:bpy.context.region_data
Images
- There is already an entire post dedicated to ways images can be optimized. See How can I optimize images and screenshots that I embed in my post?
Other
- I agree that we should use back-ticks sparingly and only for code, filenames, extensions, parameters/arguments and links to the api for functions. Don't use this for mere highlighting purposes.
- Using
<kbd>for menu items not only makes the line height inconsistent for the post but it also makes the words smaller than they need to be. Here is another good reason why this shouldn't be practiced and another meta discussion on this.
I will further update this answer as you update your question.
