markdown VS plaited

If your only target from Markdown is LaTeX, I recommend the LaTeX markdown package which uses lua to parse and convert the input markdown: https://github.com/Witiko/markdown

Pandoc shines when targetting multiple backends, like EPUB, HTML and LaTeX/PDF. But the LaTeX markdown package has one advantage when only targetting LaTeX, especially in academic settings: it translates everything to the LaTeX you'd expected. For example, citations are translated into biblatex calls, while pandoc generates all of the citations and the bibliography by itself, bypassing the style and behavior you and your professors might expect.

For a conversion to an e-book, it is possible to take a trip through (La)TeX and TeX4ht, or use Pandoc, which is pretty good at converting from Markdown to HTML (better than between, say, HTML and LaTeX). We will cover all these aspects and more in our book, which itself will be written and typeset using the Markdown package.

A lesser-known feature of Pandoc that I love are filters [0]. They allow you to manipulate the document tree mid-conversion before the output is generated. I've been working on a forked Pandoc filter that executes code blocks with Jupyter kernels, and then inserts the output [1]

[0] https://pandoc.org/filters.html

[1] https://github.com/jacobwhall/plaited