You sir, are a legend. This has strong stallman [1] vibes, and I say that not in a bad way, but as a norm-busting, trailblazing way.
I feel like software engineers are more or less used to leaving the WYSIWYG world; virtually all of use have dealt with HTML+CSS via the use of plain text editors. Once you’re used to that paradigm, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to just a command to compile to PDF.
Just to be a little clear, I run all this inside vanilla macOS. I live in the terminal 90+% of the time but I am not a complete Luddite!