reminds me of when LyX became trendy with a small group of optimists.

I mean, LyX has met my needs since 2019 - I don't particularly need to be optimistic about it. I was even able to bring in parts of my old LaTeX preamble with me, especially some utility macros. It was a pretty painless switch with immediate benefit.

(I've done everything in it from write honors theses and format CVs.)

I've been interested in Typst. But beyond report generation (which I avoid in general), I don't really have a general "document processing" tool, but multiple specialized ones, and given Typst's current jack of all trades/master of none status, I'm not sure what it'll replace. I use Quarto for a lot of my statistical computing, LyX if I need to do a lot of finicky math typesetting (e.g. if I need to break out \qquad), and Word - god forbid - for my non-technical collaborators.

LyX is cool but it was still just on top of TeX. typst is much more fundamental.

LyX is pretty great. It has an equation editor that actually works very well - once you learn it it's much nicer than typing in the raw LaTeX.

If I had to use LaTeX, I'd definitely do it via LyX.