I’m going to say something that shouldn’t be controversial but will be. If you are a Christian, you can support border control and immigration being legal vs illegal. You CANNOT celebrate deportations and get off on the cruelty, and be a real Christ follower. Period
When a question about a certain topic pops up, google it. Watch movies and documentaries. When something sparks your interest, read about it.
Read, read, read.
Study, learn, and stimulate your brain.
Don't just rely on the school system; educate your beautiful mind.
You made it, you own it
You always own your intellectual property, mailing list, and subscriber payments. With full editorial control and no gatekeepers, you can do the work you most believe in.
I'm a CS researchers and this is exactly my workflow! Very neat explanations. It's a very good balance between ease of use and expressive power since in the end you can just throw in whatever LaTeX you need to cover the few cases where pandoc markdown won't cut it, e.g., complex tables or custom diagrams.
One thing I would recommend that is slightly different from your suggestions, when dealing with e.g. anonymized and regular versions of the same paper, just separate the content from metadata, i.e., everything that would goes inside \begin{document} goes into a separate file content.md, and your main.tex has an \input{...} command. You can then have different templates, layouts, etc., just by using different main.tex wrappers on top of the same content. Pandoc has support for this natively via a --template parameter (or a similar name).