No, latex does not resemble markdown while authoring. Text ends up intermingled with ugly \sectionheader tags everywhere.

Re: automated translation, you’re projecting your requirements onto me. I can see how automatic translation would be difficult with typst. But, I don’t translate my blog into multiple languages. So that doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is the requirements I listed above - like numbered figures, captions on my images, programmatically generated tables, footnotes and so on.

You repeatedly claimed you can do this stuff with markdown. I don’t believe you.