Being in academia most of my professional life, talks are always an important part of my day-to-day job. I ditched powerpoint/google slides in favor of latex years ago, and haven't really looked back since. Over the years, I've set up templates, to apply a layout relevant to the specific context of the talk. For example, I've had templates for in-house formal and - informal talks, templates for conferences, and so on. What I liked about this is that I could always just dump text and figures into a separate tex file, import the template cls and call it a day. There are a couple of drawbacks, though. First of all, I never really took the time to understand the differences between the engines (i.e. LaTeX, LuaTex, XeTex, ...) or the distributions (i.e. MiKTeX, TeX live, MacTeX, ...), both of which seems like a rather complex ecosystems to begin with. Secondly, 'full' distributions are rather bulky. The MacTeX (2026 version) pkg, for example, is 6.4G in size. Furthermore, even though streamlining and automation of PDF compilation is rather easy, the runtime per document (especially when containing lots of figures and diagrams) is rather long. This gets particularly annoying when finalizing a talk and having to re-compile a lot to check tiny tweaks. Finally, and I really can't be the only one that struggles with this, reference / bibliography management was a gigantic pain in the neck. I never really got the hang of natbib, bibtex, or biblatex, and the 'working' solution I had with biblatex required me to compile my documents twice, which just started to get annoying. I'm sure there are ways around this, but I never really took the time to figure it out and to me it never seemed very intuitive.
I accidentally stumbled upon typst, even though I wasn't immediately looking for an alternative to latex. I didn't try the online editor, but the CLI/compiler tackles all my use cases, and I was immediately sold. First of all, installation is very easy. It's even on conda-forge, so I just wrap the installation under pixi. This also means that implementing CI/CD for created templates is extremely easy, rather than having to rely on custom curated github actions for the LaTeX distributions. Secondly, the compilation time is very fast, and the built-in 'watch' mode is a game changer for me. View as you edit is a feature I really enjoy and I use it very often for other projects with, for example, mdBook or Zola. Additionally, even though typst is still relatively new, it has a very healthy ecosystem of packages. Immediately after I made the switch, I started using touying to make animations and diagrams. Contrary to LaTeX, I felt the learning curve was very gentle, and one can almost immediately just 'get started'. All in all, I feel typst is a very promising alternative to LaTeX, and I completely made the switch and am no longer using LaTeX.