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.
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.