For years I've been maintaining my course materials in org-mode and exporting to HTML each semester. I'm in the middle of consolidating the materials into a PDF book via LaTeX export for students to print out if they want. I really like the typeset look of the resulting PDF, even though there are no equations or formulas (I'm a part-time law professor). I'm doing just-in-time learning of the necessary LaTeX via Stack Exchange; it's crude, but effective.
To be sure, the Emacs dependency is something of an entry barrier for org-mode. It helps that I've been using Emacs and various text formatters — Scribe, Final Word, and now pandoc — going back some 40 years.
I use org-mode every day for organization and documentation in org-roam. I barely touch the text markup features though. Most of the time I don't mess with exporting either. (org-mode exports to LaTeX, HTML, or practically anything via pandoc)
Have you written much using org-mode as a replacement for asciidoc/markdown etc? I should probably try to find some examples of longer-form org-mode docs and see if I can use those features.
To be sure, the Emacs dependency is something of an entry barrier for org-mode. It helps that I've been using Emacs and various text formatters — Scribe, Final Word, and now pandoc — going back some 40 years.