What problem does this address?

Right now Gutenberg has mixed support for markdown-style text shortcuts. You can use shortcuts to generate heading blocks (#), lists (-), and the horizontal rule (---). Using the ` (backtick) character will create an inline code tag for you. But there are a few others that could be helpful while writing.

What is your proposed solution?

Similar to the way Gutenberg recognizes the backtick character and converts it to code, I would like to work on extending that support to emphasis as the scope of this issue.

The ideal result here would be that users could type a single or double asterisk * or underscore _ to get <em> or <strong> tags inline.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#em