Pandoc is a ridiculously underrated and powerful tool but it solves a different problem. Someone still has to write typesetters ;)

If you are creating more complex documents, the advantages become more pronounced. Styling in Pandoc means modifying templates, at which point you’re just writing LaTeX, and styling in Typst is much nicer than in LaTeX. You can also hit the limits of Pandoc templates quite easily, at which point you have to write Lua filters. I have found those to be quite cumbersome, and now your document logic is spread out over the Markdown source file, the LaTeX template, and the Lua filters. In Typst you can have a single file with your whole document in a clean modern format, and you can decide for yourself how much you want to separate content and presentation.

Typst is a way to define a document. Headers, paragraphs, figures, equations, tables, etc. it is a direct competitor to LaTeX and maybe in some ways similar to Word, which provides a GUI for an XML defined document.

Pandoc is a converter, which given a document in one document description language outputs a document in another document description language.

What is exciting about Typst HTML support is that its goal is that it has first class support for both PDF and HTMl, which is obviously preferable to something like pandoc, which always has to rely on an intermediate representation of the document, before a conversion can happen.

You just need one (large) executable to do everything, whereas with PanDoc you (by default) need to have LaTeX installed if you want to generate PDFs