dotfiles VS emanote

Im personally using Emanote which does exactly what you describe. It supports LaTeX and lots of other features via Pandoc. Its also very nice to use in that it supports hot-reloading, instead of requiring manual refreshing. The only downside for some might be that its installed via the Nix ecosystem which is (great but) a bit of a rabbit hole you might not want to deal with, particularly depending on your level of technicality on the computer.

Have you considered neuron or it's successor emanote?

Emanote! Very lightweight. One of the things I can't stand about Notion is its speed.

Also, I'm willing to mentor anyone who is interested in improving Ema or Emanote.

Clarification: Emanote is a successor to Neuron, and written on top of Ema.

I use obsidian (previously just vim) and emanote (previously neuron) to compile some (but not all) of my notes to a static site.

I maintain an extended version of Emanote in Haskell (as an Ema app) that does custom stuff like visualize my hledger transactions, track time, generate invoice and provide custom views of my Markdown notebook, like a Twitter-like timeline generated from H2 headings (with date) from across notes.