this is specifically for papers. markdown or asciidoc doesn’t provide any tools for equations, etc. they just rely on latex which is a can of worms. Its nice to have a simpler canonical format for that
Okay, I can see that is a niche for a more accessible tool. As a computer guy I like LaTeX, but I can see it is not for everyone.
And anything that steers people away from writing papers in Word is good 😃