Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.
How do you usually collaborate with other authors? I don't know your area, but it's common to use Overleaf to collaborate on papers, and you're stuck with LaTeX there. I wrote the first draft of my thesis in Typst, but then converted to LaTeX to get feedback on Overleaf from other people.
Yes, in my field (astronomy), Overleaf is also ubiquitous, especially for observational papers with long author lists. However, by the same token, this means that most of my collaborators are distant ones, and from experience many are happy (and occasionally prefer) to conduct business by way of emailed PDFs. My close collaborators have been happy to co-edit a Markdown file by way of GitHub pull requests or directly committing to a shared repository.
I have, for a while, been toying with the idea of maintaining a fork of (or plugin for?) Overleaf CE that runs pandoc-powered build scripts instead of using latexmk directly. Perhaps this might be something vibe-codeable.