Yes, I understand all that. It is hard to move away from shitty languages once they gained market share.

But latex, while improving on many things compared to base tex is hobbled by tex as well (for example, why do I need to recompile to resolve references, haven't we invented multipass compilation like half a century ago?) I am happy to double down on "(La)tex is a shitty language." It's very useful of course, but the state of typesetting today is sort of like if everyone programmed in Cobol for some reason.