It matters because pandoc is not rendering the website to pdf, it converts the html to latex and then uses a latex engine to render the pdf.

Forgive me but I don’t understand why that matters to you and am trying to understand what the issue with Latex is.

Because lots of things work this way. For example compilers built on LLV uses an intermediate language and Python uses byte code.

I suspect some html to pdf tools go through postScript.