Those goals fall way out of the scope of LaTeX (and of course of Typst). If you want to have more control and power into a document's design, there's ConTeXt - as a graphic designer I just love it and can't imagine myself replacing it with LaTeX or Typst.
But as you said, if you want to concentrate on writing your text without thinking too much about its design, LaTeX or Typst are great for that.
Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because you can use latex in your Pandoc template and reStructuredText is very powerful to begin with, compared to most if not all Markdown dialects for example. I think it might have been easy to continue writing reStructuredText, instead of latex.
Honestly I can't remember, it has been seven years since. I don't think I was aware that I could add LaTeX inside the reStructuredText, or maybe that wasn't a feature at that time. Or maybe the formulas were too complex to express in reSturedText (my topic was differential geometry). I think my main reason was that I did want control over the final layout and I wanted to add drawings in TikZ because that way the fonts in the image would match exactly the fonts in the text.
I recently wrote a thesis in typst. I have written other thesis in latex.
In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex.
I don't need that for typst.
If typst can avoid enshittifaction over the next years, then I will stay with them.
Sure, but if you want to just _write_ then latex is just fine. I don’t understand why you had to write in markdown?
Both markdown and typst solves this.
It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that makes actually layout and designing the document approachable. I have only used it once for a quick one-off experiment and I did like the language, but as I have said above the language is not the problem if you just want to write text.
[1] That's not quite true, actually. I first wrote my thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc to generate the LaTeX and subsequent PDF. This allowed me to get started without having to write a lengthy preamble first. Then after I had more than half of it written down and had a good idea of what I wanted the document to look like did I clean up the generated LaTeX, adjust the formatting to my needs, redid the drawing in TikZ, and then kept writing LaTeX from there. I still think the language is not the problem, but it's easy to get hung up in the design phase before even the first chapter is written.