Most of the Markdown I've used has tables. I used the Bitbuket markdown page to create a test post.
The table does need padding. The line with the | and - sets the width of the column. That's shown in the screen capture.
Here's a page with a massive [table](https://gitlab.com/rvr-group/rvr-library-v2/-/wikis/API%20Table).
@rmerriam if this were twitter surely one of us would be calling the other a Nazi by now
@freemo @radehi
Sorry, false alarm. The extra dashes are ignored. Width is set by the content, generally.