I suppose that makes it inappropriate for something like rendering comments, but it's a great way to write documents. I used it a lot for writing papers since there's a lot less boilerplate and was much easier to use than TeX.
I just wish the typst compiler had a way to output html. It would be perfect for making online documentation and blog posts.
reStructuredText isn't itself a typesetting language. It's meant to be something of an interposer between the semantic meaning of what you're writing and the thing that does the typesetting. The hope is that it, unlike something heavily constrained like Markdown, gives you the tools to capture that semantic meaning and transform it into something that can be typeset.
Like, the goal isn't to throw out TeX. The goal is to be able to target TeX as a typesetter along with Web browsers and e-book readers and even things like GNU info and troff without having to rewrite the content wholesale to fit each one.
Modern web pages are already designed with "camera ready" in mind, essentially with browser width being the only thing that changes layout.
I find LaTeX to be the lesser of evils when creating PDFs. However, I rarely deal with LaTeX issues these days because all of the pain points have been patched away in my tooling that converts md to tex. However, I keep thinking something more modern or faster (like Typst) might make my life as an author easier. Compiling LaTeX with tools like rubber is still painful and slow.
1. Separate each part of a document into different TeX files and include them in the main document. Each file should be a separate unit of the work. Only compile the main document when you need to.
2. Generally write with readability in mind and use newlines and other whitespace in the source a lot more than you think you should.
3. If you have common boilerplate that you frequently use at the top of docs, make your own package(s) for those commands and maintain that separately.
4. Refs and labels everywhere you possibly can. Also, prefixing your label names helps a lot, so \label{clouds} on a picture of clouds becomes \label{fig:clouds}. If you are writing a book, and this is the chapter on the sky, consider \label{fig:sky:clouds}.
Also, is there a book that you would recommend for learning LaTeX?
I'm not sure if there is a good book on LaTeX, ironically.
The biggest issue I have seen with TeX is a people problem: people frequently write spaghetti TeX with horrible style. This is terrible, but it is not actually a language issue. Writing it with a "docs are code" mindset can produce some very clean results. The second biggest issue is that there isn't a good TeX -> HTML compiler.