[diarrhea]

A base install isn't too hard, correct. The main downside there is that a full LaTeX distribution is gigabytes in size, but that's manageable. Just takes time. Leaving out docs or using a distribution with on-the-fly package installation can solve this.

Trouble arises when you're looking to use latexmk (requires Perl), bib2gls (requires a Java runtime), minted (requires Python), latexindent (requires specific Perl libraries), including SVG (requires InkScape, and I believe ImageMagick), ...

Any notion of a powerful, sane, batteries-included development environment (think Rust and Go) requires jumping through insane hoops, resulting in bespoke setups, always on the brink of breakage. I really don't want to manage Python venvs!

The LaTeX crowd is very old school and tooling isn't natively available or built with containerization in mind. I've grown to like single-binary approaches (Caddy, typst, ...). I find vanilla LaTeX documents (the type that will compile in 20 years to come) very weak. UTF-8 still isn't standard in "vanilla LaTeX" (pdflatex)!

[Tainnor]

UTF-8 works with xetex, and both it and latexmk are easily installable from package sources on Ubuntu (and probably other distros).

You do raise some valid points, but most people don't really use those programs you've mentioned (I've only ever used minted), and you have to consider the insane breadth of things (often very specific to particular scientific disciplines) that LaTeX and its ecosystem are dealing with. Plus, IMHO it's a bad choice to abandon LaTeX's maths notation (despite its obvious weaknesses) entirely because the institutional inertia here is incredibly high; it's used basically everywhere even outside LaTeX itself (MathJax, Discord bots, several online forums, etc.). Mathematicians (and students / researchers from adjacent disciplines) have become _really_ used to it. And unlike programmers, researchers don't usually need or want paradigm shifts every few years.