Perhaps, the objective is to make JupyterLab the IDE for everything. I just hope JupyterLab doesn't go down the path of becoming everything for everything because honestly, I just don't see why the community's attention should be divided to solve problems that they aren't in the business of in the first place. But as a demonstration that you can run a latex compiler with JupyterLab plugins, great!
I recently started using Texpad [1]. A pretty fair $30/year/seat price point, if you want a local alternative to Overleaf [2]. Their incremental compilation is delightfully real-time; the lag from typing to rendering the PDF is virtually zero.
There are a few unsupported packages which I think are mostly not needed [3]. For instance, the minted package for code highlighting is something that I felt I needed, but then almost never do. The support for microtype package is hopefully coming soon. In any case, the usual fallback is available to MacTex and is supported within Texpad.
[3]: https://www.texpad.com/docs/tutorials/tex/typesetters/texpad...