I ended up with Emacs and org-mode. One of my friends used Vim and Pandoc to the same effect. I didn't quite have to write my own tool but each new LaTeX template foisted on me was hours of work that could have been spent doing research. My impression after seeing my peers work with Mendeley, Notion, Overleaf, etc. was they looked prettier at first glance but didn't solve my problem.

Over time I developed the opinion that LaTeX is an unnecessary tax on scientific progress. It's insanity to keep using it when HTML exists.

Just curious what field you are in? I've noticed that in latex and "latex alternative" discussions the problem of journal templates/styles often comes up. However, every journal I've submitted to (dozens of different ones (with lots of rejects!)) just require vanilla latex and the editorial office does the work of getting it into their format. Clearly this isn't the case for everyone though!